Jennifer Wilbanks was an attractive Georgia woman in her 30s. So was Sheri Vanessa Holland.

Wilbanks was reported missing. So was Holland.

Wilbanks – christened “the runaway bride” by cable news networks which showcased her saga around the clock – got cold feet about her impending wedding and escaped on a long bus ride to New Mexico. Then she cooked up an abduction story and made a false crime report to 911.

Now, the nation’s compassion and anxiety have turned to scorn-tinged demands for accountability. When you’ve been played for a sucker, you want revenge.

But what about Sheri Vanessa Holland, who was last seen in Florida in 1996 when she was 34? Holland remains missing. So does Beverly Gail Sabo of Ventura County, Calif. And William Joseph Jamison of Linden, N.J. And nearly 104,000 other adults and children listed as missing by the National Crime Information Center.

Their stories have not commanded the media attention that Wilbanks’ story generated – attention that may have contributed to her desperate fabrication of kidnapping.

What made Wilbanks a marquee name but not Holland and tens of thousands of others whose disappearances go relatively ignored? That’s a question for TV producers and news executives whose judgments determine the winners (losers?) of the spotlight lottery.

However, it’s also a question for the public whose appetite for soap opera story lines has been teased and nourished by so-called reality TV.

Once Wilbanks took a detour from her marital roadmap and stirred her loved ones’ anxiety, she was thrust onto a public stage where there were no shadows in which to escape a rapt audience’s view.

If you’re thinking the rise from obscurity to celebrity was predictable (what else would she expect?), try telling it to the families of Sheri Holland and 104,000 other missing Americans. A minuscule few of them received anything like the public spotlight that glared on Wilbanks and her family for days.

Some families who crave the help intense media would provide in tracking down a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, teenage rebellion or even cold feet, get skepticism instead – even from law enforcement authorities.

It is not uncommon, says Angela Ellis of the North American Missing Persons Network, for such reports to arouse limited interest, especially when they involve adults, who are deemed able to drop out of sight if they wish.

Wilbanks may yet be held to account for her antic. She appears to have committed a crime by falsely reporting she’d been kidnapped.

Beyond that, it’s a stretch to argue she should be made to pay for other people’s reactions to her whimsy.

Instead of demanding retribution, maybe the angry public ought to become more discerning about what it watches on television.

That might include letting Jennifer Wilbanks have her anonymity back, now that the mystery is solved. Transfer some of that concern from the found to the missing, such as Sheri Vanessa Holland. And Beverly Gail Sabo. And William Joseph Jamison. And the others.