ATLANTA— Jennifer Wilbanks, whose disappearance during a jog in Duluth, Ga., days before her wedding prompted a costly manhunt last month, was indicted Wednesday by a Gwinnett County grand jury on charges of lying to the police.
Wilbanks, 32, who stole away on a cross-country bus trip that landed her in New Mexico, initially claimed that she had been kidnapped, the police said.
She was charged with one misdemeanor count of falsely reporting a crime, carrying a possible penalty of a year in jail, and one count of making a false statement to a government agency, a felony punishable by up to five years in jail, District Attorney Danny Porter said.
In a recorded telephone message at her office, Wilbanks' lawyer, Lydia Sartain, said she would not comment. She has previously said she believed Wilbanks did not commit a crime. Phone calls to Wilbanks' family were not returned.
In the early-morning hours of her wedding day, four days after she vanished on April 26, Wilbanks reappeared in telephone calls to 911 in Albuquerque and to her fiance, John Mason, in Duluth, a northeast suburb of Atlanta.
The Duluth police alerted Chief Randy Belcher to the Georgia call, and he went to Mason's house and took the phone, he told reporters this month.
He said Wilbanks told him that a Hispanic man and a white woman had abducted her and driven off in a blue van and released her that night. Confronted with inconsistencies in her story, she admitted she had simply fled the pressure of planning for her wedding, the authorities said.
Despite the fact that Wilbanks was in New Mexico when she spoke to Chief Belcher, Porter said then that his office had determined that it had jurisdiction.
It was not clear when she would be arrested. Wilbanks entered an inpatient facility on May 9 for "physical and mental" treatment.
The City of Duluth was negotiating with Wilbanks on paying for its costs in the search, in which dozens of city employees joined hundreds of volunteers and law enforcement officers from other counties, the state and the federal government. Mayor Shirley Lasseter of Duluth said that on Tuesday they had reached "a verbal agreement on $13,249.09," which would pay for overtime and extra expenses.
Shannon Shafer, who volunteered at the phones for hours taking down tips during the search, said she still wanted a public apology directly from Wilbanks.
"I just feel she really owes that to all the people who spent so much time looking for her," she said.