Runaway bride moving to Splitsville?

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Duluth's runaway bride and her fiance, John Mason, may be calling it quits more than a year after she disappeared then lied about being kidnapped, according to a report on People magazine's Web site.

"I'm not confirming or denying the breakup," Jennifer Wilbanks, 33, told People on May 14. "John and I have some things to work out."

People quoted an unnamed friend of Mason as saying, "I think John realized there were some fundamental differences in their personalities that he wasn't going to be able to deal with." The magazine said Mason's father, Claude Mason, seemed relieved. "We're just glad there's a final resolution," People quoted him as saying.

Attempts by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to reach Claude Mason on Friday were unsuccessful.

A woman who answered the phone at the Mason family's Duluth medical care business, which the 33-year-old John Mason manages, said, "He's not going to talk to you" and hung up.

Wendy Cleghorn, a Wilbanks cousin who was to have been a bridesmaid at the lavish wedding-that-wasn't, said Friday morning, "I have nothing to say right now about it." She also hung up abruptly.

Mason's uncle, Dr. Miles Mason, a prominent physician in the town of more than 22,000, said he heard rumors of a breakup but couldn't confirm it was true.

Attempts to reach Wilbanks, Mason and Wilbanks' father, Harris Wilbanks, were unsuccessful.

Wilbanks disappeared four days before she was to wed Mason, a member of one of Duluth's most prominent families, in the presence of 14 bridesmaids, 14 groomsmen and 600 guests.

At the time, friends and family discounted the possibility that prewedding jitters prompted her to take off. People feared the worst.

Vigils were held, mass searches took place, and then Wilbanks surfaced in Albuquerque, N.M., with a tale of being kidnapped and sexually assaulted. The story quickly unraveled under FBI questioning. She said she had been overwhelmed by the wedding and escaped.

But the woman who fared so prominently and poorly in the public discourse remains largely a mystery. In the year since:

> She paid Duluth $13,249 to compensate the city for the overtime that police officers and other employees accumulated searching for her.

> A Gwinnett County judge found her guilty of lying to police. In June, she was sentenced to two years of probation and 120 hours of community service.

> She was ordered to pay $2,650 in restitution to the state and still owes $1,370, as well as $50 to Gwinnett County, said Peggy Chapman, spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections.

Wilbanks reportedly sold her story to ReganMedia for $500,000.