Katie Couric interviews 'runaway bride'

John called the police around midnight, about three and a half hours after he'd last seen Jennifer. By the next morning, his house was packed with friends and neighbors, a huge response from the people of Duluth and neighboring communities.

Mason: Literally before lunchtime that day, there were hundreds of people come by to make flyers. Everybody was asking me so many questions and pulling me in so many different directions, I didn't have time to really just sit there and just bawl. But I was, “All right we need to make this flyer, we got to get this passed out, we need to see if anybody's seen her here or there or anywhere." And then in the meanwhile the FBI comes in. "Sir, we need to ask you some questions."

At first, many of the friends, family, and volunteers searching for Jennifer didn't know it, but John had become "a person of interest" in her disappearance.

Couric: Meanwhile, you were being questioned because--

Mason: They thought I'd done something. Yeah. That was tough. That was really tough. They thought they had another Scott Peterson on their hands.

Within a day and a half, the story of bride-to-be Jennifer Wilbank's disappearance had exploded into a huge national story. Was she dead or alive? Was her fiancé somehow involved? While hundreds searched, millions watched, all the while, Jennifer was far from home, tucked away in a greyhound bus.

Couric: Did you have any clue at any point, Jennifer, that your story, your whereabouts, had become a national obsession?

Wilbanks: I had no idea.

Couric: None?

Wilbanks: None. I had not seen. There are no TVs on buses.

Jennifer changed buses in Dallas because she says, she feared being out alone at night. She bought a ticket to Las Vegas, which would be another long overnight trip.

Wilbanks: And it was 30-something more hours on the bus. I don't know anybody-- I've never been to Vegas.

Meanwhile, 2,000 miles away in Georgia, her loved ones were grief-stricken, her fiancé and the mother of the bride inconsolable.

Couric: Did you think it was possible that she had gone out on her own?

Mason: No way. No, I never-- that thought never entered my mind.

Couric: Never?

Mason: Nope.

Couric: That she was the runaway bride.

Mason: Right. Yeah. Never in a million years would I have thought that. She put too much into this wedding to just run away. I mean really.

John, with some of Jennifer's family by his side, made appeals for help in the frantic search. but at the same time, police and the F.B.I. pressed him to take a lie detector test.

Mason: I said something-- this don't sound right. So I talked to my lawyer, and he's like, "No we're going to do a private one, then we'll tell them about it." So that's what we did, and that was hard.

Couric: You're dealing with an awful lot of stuff in that point in time.

Mason: Yeah I didn't get two or three hours of rest. I could not get. I would try to sit down in the afternoon, and really couldn't. 

The search fanned out across a wide area. But not, it turns out, wide enough, because Jennifer was actually on the other side of the country, spending her third night on the run at the Las Vegas bus depot.

Couric: What were you eating? And you had no change of clothes, right? So you were wearing--

Wilbanks: The same clothes the whole entire time. I had taken a few little snacks with me, just some little candy bars and things.

Jennifer says she cried when she thought of the anguish she must be causing.

Wilbanks: It hurt me so bad to think that. And because it hurt so bad, it made it harder for me to think about going back. Because I knew obviously how hurt they were going to be.

Couric: So the longer it went on, in a way, the harder it was to face what you had done and face them and John.

Wilbanks: Right.

With the last of her money she bought one last ticket, this time to New Mexico. She denies reports that she was headed there to see an old boyfriend. Arriving in Albuquerque Friday night, her fourth night on the run, she wandered around Albuquerque's east side and picked up a payphone outside a 7-11.