Cold case breakthrough brings answers in Tyesha Bell murder

For years, friends and family of Taisha Bell waited and waited for answers as to how this 22-year-old mother of two suddenly disappeared. Then they waited for more answers as to why her bones were found in a wooded area in Montgomery almost two decades later. She was last seen the night of May 8, 2003, in the Aurora apartment she shared at the time with her sister, Latasha Bell. I knew it was going to come to this day one day because we knew that he was the only suspect that they had. And I've been waiting for this day. This spring, 23 years later, in a courtroom on the second floor of the Kane County Judicial Center, they finally got some answers. That's when a Yorkville man named Prince Cunningham stood trial for Belle's death in a missing persons case turned murder. When you look at these types of cases, when they're domestic violence potential cases, you look at the most likely suspects. And the first person you always look at is the person that they're in a relationship with. And they were in a secret relationship because Prince Cunningham was married and he had kids, and he had ultimately gotten Taisha pregnant. Kane County State's Attorney Jamie Mosser helped prosecute this case herself. Not only is it one of the first cases that she received as a newly elected state's attorney, it's also personal. My dad went missing when I was in sixth grade, when I was 11 years old. And for the next 10 years, we had no idea what happened to him. His car was found in Chicago with the front window smashed in. There was blood spatter. Mosser says her dad eventually came home 10 years later and explained what happened. Bell's family never got that chance, something Mosser says makes her heartbreak for them even deeper. But now they had to also find out that the reason why she's been missing for 17 years and these girls didn't have their mom for 17 years and Lorna didn't have a daughter for 17 years was because the boyfriend, the person who's supposed to love her, and the father of one of her children decided that her life wasn't worth it enough. And so for me, that case became about getting them justice at the very end because that's what they deserve to be able to finally move forward. Bell's mother, Lorna Smith, filed a missing persons report with Aurora Police on May 10, 2003. Unit 32 got a hold of the 252-page report that shows police combing through five different area morgues and conducting nearly a dozen ground searches using cadaver dogs. The report says those locations were chosen because they were easy to access, close to Bell's apartment or Cunningham's workplace, and according to investigators, places where a body could be easily concealed. The report also details weeks of interviews with Belle's family, her friends, and Cunningham as investigators tried to piece together what happened to her. They even questioned an ex-boyfriend Belle was still in contact with. But interview after interview, investigators were still left without a solid lead. We don't know a lot about that night. We know that he was at work, and he's admitted to that. We know that she had gone out shopping with her friends to Stratford Square Mall because they were looking for an outfit for her funeral. One of them was going to go to. We know that she was happy all day. Her daughters were with family during that time period. She came back later that evening. Throughout the entire day, she'd been having conversations with him. She'd also been having conversations with the other boyfriend who is now just her friend during that time period. She was excited for him to come over. She had gotten her car repossessed recently, and he was promising to give her $12,000 so she could buy a new car, so she was looking forward to that as well. So we knew he was coming over that night because that's what he did. He worked the second shift, so he'd usually be off by 11 midnight something around that time period, and he would just come over to her house because his wife worked the third shift, so the wife would have no idea that he wasn't coming home. So we know at some point around May 10th, early morning hours. She received a phone call from his cell phone to her cell phone that was about a minute in duration and she left the house. Her sister who lived with her at the time could hear the phone ring and knew it was his phone ring. She had programmed that ringtone for him so she knew that and then that was it. Nobody ever saw or heard from her again. She left a candle burning. She She left the light on in her room, the door was unlocked, all of her stuff was left behind, which is abnormal for what she would do. After she was reported missing, Aurora Police went to Belle's apartment looking for clues. They took pictures of some key areas, and they also took a photo album Belle made of her and Cunningham and her toothbrush. It might not seem like much, but those items will later lead to a payoff for prosecutors. then, investigators spent the next 17 years trying to find out what happened to Taisha Bell. In December of 2020, Mosser says Aurora police got a break in Bell's missing person case. A surveyor happened to find a skull in a wooded area in Montgomery. It was about a mile from E.B. Brown, the food distribution warehouse where Cunningham worked, and Bell was a former employee. And Mosser was just elected Kane County State's attorney the month before. It really started off pretty dramatically to have a body found that they knew was related to something, something bad had happened, especially because we knew she had a single bullet wound to the back of her head. So this was going to be a homicide case. It was just finding out who she was and then finding out who did this to her. When they did their very thorough investigation from 2003 up until the time that we went to trial, they left no stone unturned. And it was always believed that Prince Cunningham was the person who did something to her, but without a body, without a confession, there was nothing that we were going to be able to do. And to know that she was found buried in a wooded remote area nearby where he worked made them believe that it was likely her because he would be somebody who would have knowledge of that area. Now, investigators had to identify the bones and if they were Taisha's. There was no identifying features left on her. Dr. Mitra Kailakar is the Kane County forensic pathologist who helped identify Taisha's remains and determine her cause of death. It is harder for sure because we have to check all the bones. We have to call in consultants, anthropology consultants, and we have to also make a positive identification. So we have to call in dental experts to compare, you know, anti-mortem and post-mortem dental findings. Dr. Kailikar and her team also had to do DNA comparisons. And that's where Bell's toothbrush became so important. It gave them a DNA sample to help determine whether the bones found in that wooded area in Montgomery were hers. And that's why we're very lucky because if you think about it, in 2003, nobody really understands DNA. We understand the concept of DNA, but what we know now is not what we knew then. But thankfully, the Aurora Police Department was smart enough to take her toothbrush and her razor, both of which would have had DNA on it. They packaged it properly so that way it wasn't degraded over time, and we were able then to take samples from that to compare to DNA that was in her femur. Once those remains were identified as Taisha, Kane County prosecutors charged Cunningham with first-degree murder. That was June 2022. They were in a secret relationship because Prince Cunningham was married and he had kids, and he had ultimately gotten Taisha pregnant. Taisha had a baby girl. When she was about two years old, Taisha started asking Prince for child support, and that's when their relationship took a turn for the worse. She expected child support from him, and either he was going to give it to her or she would take him back to court. Court records show Cunningham told police they were garnishing his wages for child support, but he told them she would have to have it stopped because he was going to get a lawyer and sue her, and she did. Cunningham also told police the baby girl was not his child. However, investigators checked the results of a 2001 paternity test Bell and Cunningham did with the Child Support Enforcement Division. Court records say the test results confirmed he is the baby's father. We're never going to know how he did it, when he pulled the gun on her, what he said during that time, what she said, what she felt. We can only imagine, because I believe he shot her in the forest. I don't believe he shot her in his car. I think he probably made her walk into this forested area. I think he probably had the gun on her this entire time, and he waited until she was there and shot her in the back of the head. So what had happened is, during the relationship, he used to come into the apartment. Over the last few months before her disappearance, he stopped doing that and kept having her meet in the parking lot. About a week, two weeks before this incident, according to her sister, he had done something similar where he had asked her to bring the baby and they were going to go look at the apartment he was going to rent for all of them. But when she came back home, she told her sister that they couldn't find the apartment. Well, on this particular night, it was raining. He had called her. We know that she then calls a cousin who has the baby, basically asking to take the baby, and the cousin's like, no, because she's sleeping and it's really raining out. Just come get her in the morning. We believe that that first incident, that week or two that happened before, was him trying this out, planning, like, how easy would it be to get her in the car and to drive around. Mosser says Bell left her apartment and got in Cunningham's car that night because she loved and trusted him. I think the most, the clearest thing that shows how in love she was with him is the fact that the picture frame said Mr. and Mrs. Prince Cunningham. During the trial, prosecutors showed another photo Bell had that said, I heart Prince. Mosser believes Cunningham got Bell to trust him by making her several promises. I think he did that over the years, promising for them to be in a family and take care of her so that it would be easy for him to get her in the car and him to drive her away from her home and her safety so that he could take her life. Mosser says there was more to Cunningham's plan. And sadly and very grimly, if you think about it, he was trying to get the baby there for this time as well. And thankfully, because the cousin said no, I believe the baby's still alive for that reason today. And so the premise, again, was he was going to show her where this apartment was. And then, again, never came back. So you think he would have taken the baby's life, too? Yes, I do. Even though Dr. Kailikar says Bell's cause of death was obvious, prosecutors still have their obstacles to overcome proving that during the trial. Her cause of death was a gunshot wound to the back of her head. We found the skull in the woods with a hole on the back of the head with fractures radiating from that hole. And we x-rayed, of course, the skull. found a bullet inside the head. So she was shot. The issue prosecutors faced is with the bullet that was found inside the skull. After being buried for 17 years in the woods, it didn't necessarily look like a bullet anymore. There was also no exit wound in the skull. When an Illinois state police firearms identification examiner was asked to determine if it was a bullet, she testified she could not because she has nothing else to compare it to. The bullet had flattened over time, and no longer had its original shape. Cunningham's trial happened in May of 2026. It ran seven days, and in less than an hour, the jury reached a verdict. That had Mosser concerned when the judge summoned both sides back into the courtroom. When it's like less than an hour, you just automatically assume it's a not guilty, and I didn't think that that was possible because of the sheer amount of evidence. I mean, our whole case was a week long that we put in. There was so much circumstantial evidence over and over again and things that the defendant did, like his lies, like how he included the whole shoe portion of it. Had he not tried to report that, we would have no way to identify that that shoe is even related to him. And so as I'm walking down there, it's like a pit in my stomach thinking there's no way they've disregarded every single piece of that evidence. Investigators found a gray Converse shoe while recovering Tyesha's remains in that wooded area in Montgomery. Mosser believes Cunningham buried her there and that he lost his shoe while doing so. When asked about that, Cunningham told police his car had been broken into while he was at work and that a pair of Converse shoes and $30 were stolen. In the end, the jury found him guilty on both counts of first-degree murder. He cheated us out of a little sister. He cheated her children out of their mother when these girls get married or have their babies they need their mother to be there most importantly he took her away from her mother and we want to see justice today big justice it's been a long time hearing them say guilty it was just like a breath out of me and like all the stress left because they that's what they deserved they deserve to hear that and He deserved to be found guilty. Mosser says Cunningham's cell phone records and this document were the keys to their case. The cell phone records show Cunningham was the last one to call Bell's cell phone. The Illinois Appellate Court ruling allowed statements made by Bell prior to her death to be entered into the court record. It's called the hearsay doctrine of forfeiture by wrongdoing. So I say all of this and everybody's like, we have no idea what this is. But then you talk about Drew Peterson, the former Bolingbrook police officer. the statements of both of his ex-wives Kathleen Savio and Stacey Peterson were allowed to come in because he killed them to prevent them from being able to testify. So this is well settled now in Illinois law that if you kill somebody to prevent them from testifying like Prince Cunningham killed Taisha to prevent her from taking him back to child support you don't get to benefit by not having their statements kept out because hearsay During closing arguments Cunningham's defense attorneys argued, in part, their client didn't kill Bell because he has no history of violence, while Bell's ex-boyfriend does have one. In the end, the jury convicted Cunningham on May 27, 2026. Two months later, Kane County Judge Julia Yetter sentenced him to 70 years in prison, followed by three years supervised release. Before the judge handed down his sentence, Cunningham told the court he maintains his innocence and he told his now 25-year-old daughter that he loved her. On August 21st, 2026, the 53-year-old defendant reported to Stateville Correctional Center We're never going to give up if we can. And I think that's the biggest thing that we need people to understand is that in 2003, when she went missing, everyone suspected that it was Prince Cunningham, but we couldn't prove that she was dead. We just knew that she was missing. They never gave up. And that's what we in law enforcement do because we ultimately want to do what's right. Every year, they continue to look at that case. They always ran down anything that happened because they wanted to get answers to Taisha's family. And I think, but for that, we would never have been able to prove this. So I think it's important for people to understand that it may go cold, the case may go cold for a while, but we're always looking at that. We're always looking to see if there's a way that we can prove the case. And Aurora created their cold case unit, and this is one of the best parts that have come out of that is because we have been able to solve this. Cunningham is appealing the jury's verdict to the state appellate court. He's represented by an appellate court public defender. We contacted Cunningham's trial defense attorneys as well as his appellate public defender regarding our story. One of his trial attorneys told us that they had no comment. We have not heard back from his other attorney. Lauren Scafidi, Fox Chicago.