Retired Marine Helps Police Bust Fiancee in Alleged Murder-for-Hire Plot

A Tennessee man contacted local authorities after his fiancée made a concerning request. According to police reports, the woman asked her fiancé, a retired Marine, if he could make the father of her 3-year-old child “go away.”

Joseph Chamblin’s tip prompted a police investigation that culminated in Laura Ann Buckingham’s Feb. 24 arrest in a murder-for-hire plot.

Laura Ann Buckingham. (Image via Facebook/Roane County Sheriff's Office)

Chamblin and Buckingham, both 29, began dating in April. But when his girlfriend’s pleas for his help in having another man killed became a common occurrence, Chamblin started recording her, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel. Three weeks ago, he handed the recordings over to investigators.

The Marine Corps Times reached out to Chamblin Friday, but the former Marine Chamblin declined to comment about the arrest. He did, however, confirm that he and Buckingham were engaged.

Buckingham was arrested Wednesday for trying to hire a hit man to murder her former boyfriend, Bradley Sutherland of Louisville, Kentucky.

The hit man ended up being an undercover agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the News Sentinel reported.

Buckingham now faces a charge of criminal attempt to commit first-degree murder. She is being held on $150,000 bond.

WDRB-TV reported that Buckingham was involved in a contentious custody case with Sutherland and paid the undercover posing as a hit man $300.

“We’ve always had a very civil relationship and the fact that it came to this … it blows my mind,” Sutherland told WDRB-TV Friday. The two had lunch together the weekend before the arrest, along with their son and Sutherland's new fiancée. “I don’t know why she did it. I don’t know.”

On Thursday, Chamblin asked a judge for an order of protection, claiming that Buckingham had also threatened him in the past, according to the News Sentinel.

This isn’t the first time Chamblin has made national headlines. He and three other Marines sparked international uproar in 2012 when video of them urinating on Taliban corpses in Afghanistan surfaced on social media, the Marine Corps Times reported.

After being demoted one rank as the result of a special court-martial, Chamblin left the Marine Corps in 2013. That same year, in an interview with the Marine Corps Times, he defended his actions in Afghanistan.

(H/T: Fox News)