ROANE COUNTY, Tenn. — A woman who tried to hire a hit man to kill the father of her child was sentenced Thursday to 10 years probation in Roane County Court.
32-year-old Laura Ann Buckingham pleaded guilty to solicitation to commit first degree murder last year.
The man Buckingham tried to hire as a hit man was an undercover TBI agent.
She was arrested in 2016.
Court documents say she spent 29 days in jail, and has been out on bond since then.
According to court documents, Buckingham joined the United States Marine Corps in 2004 and served as a field radio operator in a combat zone in Iraq.
She was honorably discharged in 2008, and not long after the documents say she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Later she met Brad Sutherland, the man the documents say she would later try to get killed. They had a son, and the couple later separated.
In 2014 Buckingham opened a bakery outside Louisville. During this time, she reportedly met and started dating Joseph Chamblin, and in 2016 moved to Roane County to live with him.
Chamblin told police Buckingham was trying to find someone to kill Sutherland.
The documents say in February 2016, an undercover TBI agent posed as a hit man and recorded his interaction with Buckingham. She was later arrested.
WBIR's sister station WHAS in Louisville interviewed Sutherland after he learned about the situation.
"I don't care what she did, I don't care how she did it. It doesn't matter to me. The fact of the matter is that I now have my son," Sutherland said to WHAS in 2016.
The documents say Buckingham is now running her baking business in East Tennessee.
The documents also say, "Before and after this episode she was and is a model citizen who has had to cope with the exposure of combat duty as a female."
The documents cite excerpts from at least nine letters from people who have worked with Buckingham in the military and in her communities.
Chamblin was court-martialed for urinating on Taliban corpses in Afghanistan in 2011, but the charges were later dropped.