In the days after her husband was reported missing to the Texas Army base where he was stationed, Cam Chamberlain sent a series of urgent Facebook messages to a longtime friend: When he disappeared, she said, he left her with no food and no money.
She wasn’t working, she was estranged from her family, and her efforts to get help from the Army had gone nowhere, two longtime friends said.
“I’m scared,” she wrote to Jessica D’Lynn Pyles in a message the friend shared with NBC News. “I’m alone. I just want the pain to go away. I can’t take it anymore.”
Within a week of that message, Cam Chamberlain’s death was announced, and the next day, her husband — who had been missing for 11 days — was discovered alive. Spc. Craig Chamberlain, 23, had “willfully” disappeared from his unit, according to Army officials at his post, Fort Cavazos.
Military authorities have offered few answers about what happened, and friends of Cam Chamberlain, who was in her late 20s, have said they’ve found no solace in the aftermath of her death: There have been no autopsy, no obituary and no funeral.
Officials confirmed her death in a statement May 25. The couple lived off base, and a spokeswoman for the Killeen Police Department referred questions about the case to Fort Cavazos authorities, who put out a statement confirming the death. They didn’t provide details about when or where she died, and her cause and manner of death haven’t been disclosed.
Army investigators launched a criminal probe. A spokeswoman for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division declined to comment further, citing an ongoing investigation.
A quick marriage and an overseas assignment
Craig and Cam Chamberlain met a few years ago through a dating app and were married in 2020, according to her Facebook page. Though Eubank believed the couple had rushed things, they initially seemed happy, she said.
“The way he treated her — he put her on a pedestal,” said Eubank, who met Cam when they worked together at an insurance company in Waco more than a decade ago. “He treated her better than anyone had treated her.”
She was a people person, Eubank said — someone who was as outspoken as she was happy and goofy.
D’Lynn Pyles said, “You knew where she stood on things.”
In an interview with a Texas newspaper, Cam described her husband as laid back, patient and carefree. He has a unicorn tattooed on the upper part of his right arm, his mother said.
