There is a compelling reason behind the huge smile Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser immediately gave to Lorna Smith at the conclusion of the recent sentencing of Prince Cunningham. There’s also an extraordinary explanation behind the embrace they shared in the courtroom hall.
Both personally know what it is like to deal with the disappearance of a loved one.
Smith’s 22-year-old daughter walked out of her home in Aurora to meet Cunningham, the father of her youngest daughter, in May of 2003. But Smith did not learn her fate until 17 years later when Tyesha Bell’s remains were found buried in a field in Montgomery.
Mosser had to wait 10 years before the mystery of her father’s disappearance was solved.
But unlike Tyesha, who had been shot in the back of the head, Mosser’s dad purposely did not return home, and only reappeared after getting arrested for faking his death and stealing another man’s identity.
The difference in the outcomes is not insignificant. But the excruciating wait was similar, says Mosser, who was only 11 and a self-described “daddy’s girl” when Donald Mosser walked out of his Glendale Heights home the evening of Aug. 11, 1989, to “go bowling and he never came back.”
The 41-year-old man left behind four young daughters and his wife Vicki, who received a call the following morning from Chicago police, asking her to pick up his abandoned car that had been found with the driver’s window broken, according to reports.
His wallet, car phone and briefcase were missing, says Mosser, who still remembers seeing the blood spatters on the Oldsmobile’s glass and steering wheel, and her mother’s phone call to the Glendale Heights police the following day to report her husband missing.
For a number of years, she recalls, her mom was “followed and questioned” by authorities, who are frequently suspicious of a spouse or partner in a missing persons case. But Mosser will also never forget Tony Mineo, a “kind detective” with the Glendale Heights Police Department who “did not for a second believe Mom had anything to do with it,” offering a “sense of calm” by frequently visiting their home and providing updates.
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In the meantime, that house went into foreclosure and her mother had to divorce her father to sell it. She also lost the cars and took a job at a White Hen Pantry a few blocks away, eventually working a second job as a receptionist at an electronics business to support her four young daughters.
In 1996, seven years after her husband disappeared, Vicki passed away at age 48 from a bleeding ulcer, which was “directly related to the stress” she underwent because of her father’s actions, insists Mosser, the second oldest child who by that time was in college.
Three years later, she and her older sister were contacted by a New York attorney letting them know their dad was alive and wanting to speak to his children.
“Shock,” is the word Mosser used when I asked how she felt.
But anger soon followed, especially after a phone call between Donald Mosser and all her siblings, including the two youngest who were living with an aunt in Savanna, Illinois, after their mother’s passing.
The explanation behind this family man’s strange case is well chronicled in many Chicago and New York news stories. But until now, Jamie Mosser has never publicly talked about it or the impact her dad’s “selfish” actions had on the people who had to pick up the pieces.
It turns out Donald Mosser, who according to reports was active in his community and even served as a girls softball coach, owned a steel fabricating business he claimed was failing. Also in debt for about $20,000 to bookies, he decided his family would be better off if he faked his death so they could collect life insurance, according to reports.
However, Illinois law required a seven-year period before a missing person could be legally declared dead. Vicki’s death further delayed this process, and just a couple months before the court was to make its decision, says Mosser, her father reappeared.
The only reason he resurfaced, she said, was because the federal government had finally caught up with him. And before his arrest for stealing the identity of a former employee hit the media, he wanted to justify his actions to his daughters.
After Donald Mosser spent a few months in prison, Mosser and her sister eventually flew to New York to meet with him in person, a visit she described as “weird,” especially when he gifted them with stuffed bunnies.
While her siblings chose not to have a relationship with him, Mosser kept in occasional contact, which included her father’s visit to Louisiana, where she had her first job as a prosecutor.
Mosser says it wasn’t until after the birth of her second child she realized her dad’s behavior – coming across as the victim – was not healthy for her family. The last time she saw her father was at her grandmother’s funeral in 2017, an encounter that may have been a reminder of where she came from but not where she was going.
Mosser never let the trauma of her childhood define the course of her life, and gives plenty of credit to other family members, especially her dad’s younger brother Robert, who became a father figure to her and grandfather to her children.
But most of Mosser’s praise goes to her mother – “the toughest person” in her life, who “knew the difference between right and wrong and never gave up.”
“I was luckier than most,” she continues, because of that “one strong parental figure” in her life.
Mosser considers her decision to become an attorney – which included working as an academic advisor at DePaul University to help pay for night classes – as a legacy from her mother, who encouraged her argumentative daughter, even as a child, to go into law.
Eventually, that instinct to advocate would become deeply personal.
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Although she was living in New Orleans at the time Tyesha Bell went missing, Mosser had just started her first term as state’s attorney in Kane County when the murdered woman’s remains were found in December of 2020. Even with COVID-19 distancing and masks in play, she clearly recognized the pain and grief on the faces of Smith and her granddaughters at the press conference conducted by Aurora police after the discovery.
“From that point forward I knew I would continue to work on this personally,” Mosser says, adding that Cunningham’s recent sentencing was also important as “I wanted to get to that final conclusion because I know what it is like living with hope and then having it dashed.”
Those 70 years in prison the judge handed down to Cunningham on Aug. 7 not only brought more closure to Tyesha’s family, says Mosser, “it reaffirmed all of what I went through that brought me to where I need to be.”
And it was a reminder that the past has a way of finding its way into the present.
Mosser recalls how exhausted she had become toward the end of her first campaign for state’s attorney. About a week or two before Election Day, however, she was contacted by a DuPage attorney who, while working a case at the Kane County Courthouse, saw her name and photo.
Could she, he asked, be the daughter of the woman he helped through a divorce from her missing husband?
Then he told Mosser she “was the spitting image” of that young mother he would never forget because of all she had been through.
“I began sobbing in my car. But it rejuvenated me for the rest of the campaign,” says Mosser who, as a prosecutor knows how some people can get through trauma and do well while others never survive it.
“My mother,” she insists, “is the true hero of this story.”