For nearly two decades, Lorna Smith lived somewhere between hope and heartbreak.
“Until I get a knock at my door and police tell me they have found my daughter’s remains, I will continue to think of her as alive,” Smith had told me in an interview 11 years after her 22-year-old daughter Tyesha Bell went missing from her home in Aurora in 2003.
Six years later, that proverbial knock came.
Skeletal remains found by a surveyor in a Montgomery field in late 2020 were publicly identified as Tyesha’s the following March.
And just like that, a cold case Aurora police never gave up on turned into a full-fledged murder investigation that benefitted from forensics and a lot of persistence.
In June of 2022, Tyesha Bell’s former boyfriend, Prince Cunningham, was arrested and charged with killing her with a gunshot to the back of the head.
And finally, this week, the man who had long been considered a suspect could no longer outrun accountability: A Kane County jury found the 54-year-old Yorkville man guilty of murdering the mother of his child.
It has been a long and painful journey for Smith, as I’m sure it has for Tyesha’s daughters, who are now adults but were just 2 and 5 years old when their mother mysteriously walked out of her Randall Road apartment on that early spring morning in 2003.
Smith, who raised those little girls and made sure they never forgot their mom, relied on her deep Christian faith to help her get through each day that followed.
“Just when I get to those moments my hope is fading,” she told me on the 10th anniversary of Tyesha’s disappearance, ”then God gives me something, a sign that brings it back.”
In that 2013 interview, Smith was referring to the national headlines that three women held against their will for a decade in the home of a Cleveland man had been found.
It was a major story, of course. But what always bothered me about Tyesha’s disappearance and murder is how it never got the high-profile media treatment it deserved – certainly not at a regional or national level. Even at the 2021 news conference when Aurora police announced it was Tyesha’s remains found in a wooded area of Montgomery, only a handful of news outlets attended, and in fact a couple of journalists I spoke with didn’t even have files on her disappearance.
Cases involving missing Black and brown women have long struggled to draw the same sustained public attention that often surrounds missing white women, leaving many families to fight for visibility as well as answers.
Count Lorna Smith among those who never gave up. She made it a point of contacting our newsroom on every anniversary of her daughter’s disappearance because she knew it was up to her to keep Tyesha’s name in the public eye.
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Those interviews were also glimpses into the emotional journey Smith was going through. Long suspicious of Cunningham, who was the last person to see Tyesha alive, she told me in a 2014 interview that she let her anger go, relying heavily on her Christian faith to come to a place of peace.
The family chose to keep their grief private when Tyesha’s remains were identified. But I’d like to think Cunningham’s arrest and subsequent conviction has lifted the burden Smith was forced to carry all these years.
I was not there for Cunningham’s murder trial, which lasted six days and took the jury less than an hour to reach that guilty verdict. But I plan to be in the courtroom when Judge Julia Yetter hands down a sentence of between 45 and 85 years.
“This verdict sends a message that no amount of time, deception or concealment can erase the truth or diminish our commitment to pursuing justice for victims and their families,” said Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser in a press release, also noting the “remarkable strength and dignity” Tyesha’s family displayed through this arduous ordeal.
In that same press release, Aurora Police Chief Matt Thomas also paid tribute to the determination of Tyesha’s family, especially her mother who he noted “never stopped fighting for justice for her daughter.”
And, while Lorna Smith never got the happy ending she had hoped and prayed for, as Chief Thomas pointed out, “After so many years without answers, I am thankful we were able to help provide some measure of closure …”