Katie Couric interviews 'runaway bride'

For the next several days, Jennifer wavered. Then, on the day the ticket would expire, Tuesday the 26, just four days before the wedding, she made up her mind.

Couric: What was it that made you reach that breaking point where you said I have got to get out of here?

Wilbanks: I know everybody wants this great answer to that but it wasn't one certain thing. Or I--  there was one moment when I said I cannot do this. I don't want to do this anymore. 

It was 8:30 on the night of April 26. Jennifer told John she was going to go for a run. It wasn't quite a lie. She did run. Just much farther than anyone thought she would.

On the night of Tuesday, April 26, just four days before her wedding, bride-to-be Jennifer Wilbanks told her fiancé John Mason she was going out for a run. It was around 8:30. In fact, it was a "cut-and-run." She had chopped off her shoulder-length hair.

Couric: You'd brought some scissors with you and just decided you were going to cut it all off.

Wilbanks: Yeah.

Couric: Any reason?

Wilbanks: I didn't want to be found. 

Jennifer says she had only $140 on her. She then took a taxi to catch a Greyhound bus at the Atlanta airport.

Couric: Why didn't you get on an airplane? Did you think you could be traced because the manifest and ID?

Wilbanks: I wasn't thinking anything like that at the time. For whatever crazy reasons, it just seemed like it would be safe for me to be on a bus. Just seemed like I could hide out better on a bus.

It was around 10:15 that night, back at the house, that Jennifer's fiancé John Mason first got concerned.

Mason: Was like whoa, she's been gone a long time. Should I go look for her? I drove all around Duluth looking in all the ditches that I could find.

Couric: You said you were looking in ditches.

Mason: I was looking all over the place. I didn't know, she could've turned an ankle and fallen or somebody could've beaten her up. I didn't know what to expect at that point. No idea.

He had no idea that Jennifer felt besieged. That she would run away never occurred to him. But, at 10:30 that night she was gone. She was scared, lonely and absolutely desperate.

Wilbanks: That night, in that moment, it really became a life or death decision for me.

Why she felt that way wouldn't be known until later. At that moment, all Jennifer says she could do was flee. She got on the bus and began her odyssey on the interstate....

Couric: What was going through your mind? All sorts of things must've been?

Wilbanks: All sorts of things. I was very, very scared. I think those first several hours, I didn't sleep. I just sat in the window seat by myself. And I just stared out the window.

Couric: When you're on that bus at any point in time did you think my family is sick with worry? My fiancé is probably so undone by this? I think some people feel that this was extraordinarily selfish of you to not consider how devastating this was to put your poor mom and dad and step-parents through this. Did that enter your mind at any point?

Wilbanks: Not before I left. I didn't think about what it would do to other people.  

Couric: Did you try not to think about them?

Wilbanks: I tried not to. But only because I didn't care. It's just that's my way.

Couric: What do you mean?

Wilbanks: I was running from that. I mean it I knew that I had hurt them. So I just pushed it down, you know, tried not to think about it. And I know that sounds so harsh.

But as the bus rumbled through the night, she says she cried about what she was doing to her family and fiancé, her thinking so frazzled she barely had a destination. She decided on Austin, Texas, because days earlier, while planning her get-away, she saw the city in a documentary featuring actor Matthew McConaughey.

Wilbanks: I wasn't going there to find Matthew McConaughey. I was watching that. I was, like, oh, I'll go to Austin, Texas. It just seemed like it wasn't out of reach. I could get there. You know, could find something to do when I got there.

But she never did get there. The next morning, after more than 10 hours on the bus, it all began to hit her:

Wilbanks: And I was, like, oh my gosh. I really did it. You know, I didn't go home. You know, I've run away. And I panicked from that moment on. I panicked.

Meanwhile, that first night back in Duluth, Jennifer's fiancé, John, was panicking as well.

Mason: I was just in a fog. I didn't know what to think.