For seventeen years, no one knew what had happened to twenty-two-year-old Tisha Bell. Then, in December 2020, a land surveyor working at a construction site in Montgomery, Illinois, found her remains. Lying beside her was something investigators had heard about years earlier: a pair of Converse shoes. Back in 2003, a man connected to Tisha had filed a police report claiming those same shoes had been stolen from his car.

At the time, that report had helped deflect suspicion from him. Now the very shoes he reported missing were found with the woman who had disappeared seventeen years earlier. Tisha Bell was a working mother of two daughters, living in Aurora, Illinois. Her oldest daughter lived with Tisha’s mother, while her youngest, just a year old, lived with Tisha and her sister Latasha in their apartment on North Randall Street.

The day before she vanished, Tisha spent the afternoon shopping with a friend, picking out clothes for her children. That evening, she settled in at home with her sister and her daughter, as she did most nights. Late that night, Tisha made a call to a relative, then received another call from someone outside the family. She did not say who was on the other end, but she told those close to her that she was expecting money, which she planned to use to buy a car.

Within hours, she was gone. She left without her purse. She left without her ID. A candle remained lit in her bedroom, as if she expected to return within minutes.

In the days that followed, family members left dozens of messages on her phone. None were ever answered. At the time of her disappearance, Tisha was involved with a man named Prince Cunningham. Court records later confirmed he was married at the time to a woman unaware of the relationship, and that he was the biological father of Tisha’s youngest daughter, a fact later established through DNA testing.

For a period, Cunningham paid child support through the court, with the money deducted directly from his paycheck. Then, according to court records, he persuaded Tisha to drop the court order. Instead, the two agreed to a less formal arrangement, cash payments delivered personally, on his terms rather than the state’s. They met frequently to complete the deliveries.

The relationship was not without conflict. On one occasion, Cunningham himself called Aurora police after Tisha showed up at the home he shared with his wife. In the weeks before her disappearance, prosecutors later said, Tisha told him she intended to return to court and reinstate the wage garnishment. Tisha’s sister reported her missing on May 11, 2003.

Aurora police, led by Sergeant Jim Corsey, opened an investigation immediately. Officers canvassed the apartment complex and spoke with Tisha’s friends, coworkers, and men she had previously dated, working to rule out anyone who might know where she had gone. One friend, Tiffany James, told investigators that Tisha had argued on the phone with someone the night she disappeared, though police could not confirm the caller’s identity at that point. Then in 2004, investigators identified a man living near Tisha’s apartment.

For a moment, the case seemed ready to break. Police searched his home for anything linking him to her disappearance. Nothing surfaced. The case stalled.

Around 2006, Sergeant Corsey retired. The file passed to Investigator Jeff Conings, who inherited a case built on interviews and hunches, but with no physical evidence to examine. In 2003, DNA testing existed, but it worked by comparison, a sample from a crime scene matched against a known reference. Without remains, there was no sample to test and no database entry to search against.

Cell phone records could sometimes locate a person, but carriers in 2003 kept far less data than they do today, and extracting those records required a level of precision investigators did not then possess. They knew a call had come in, but not where from or who made it. Conings worked the file whenever new tips arrived, but for years, nothing moved the case forward. Tisha Bell remained officially classified as missing, a classification that legally could not change without a body.

Under Illinois law, prosecutors could not charge murder without proof of death, and without remains, medical examiners had nothing to examine. In December 2020, the land surveyor’s discovery changed everything. Police returned to the site and recovered additional remains, along with clothing and personal belongings. Skeletal remains alone were not enough to confirm identity.

What followed was a forensic process that took months. Examiners compared dental records with those kept for missing persons in the area, while the crime lab conducted DNA analysis, matching results against samples provided by Tisha Bell’s family. Dental comparison came first, because dental records are often preserved for years and can confirm identity even when other physical evidence has degraded. DNA testing came second, as independent confirmation.

Direct sample from Tisha herself was not needed; genetic material shared with close family members was sufficient to establish the match. It was not until March 2021, three months after the initial discovery, that investigators confirmed the remains were those of Tisha Bell. With identity confirmed, the medical examiner could determine what investigators had waited seventeen years to know. The case was no longer a missing person file.

It was a homicide. With Tisha Bell’s death classified as murder, investigators returned to everything Prince Cunningham had said in the days after her disappearance and began finding inconsistencies. In 2003, shortly after Tisha disappeared, Cunningham had contacted the Montgomery police department himself, claiming that a Converse shoe and a piece of jewelry had gone missing from his car. He suggested Tisha might have taken them.

The same shoe was later found beside her remains. Investigators also learned that in his initial interviews, Cunningham had denied having a romantic relationship with Tisha and denied being the father of her daughter, claims DNA testing later proved false. Shortly after Tisha’s disappearance, Cunningham deactivated his phone and changed his number. He also gave his car to a relative, a decision that delayed investigators from locating and searching the vehicle for months.

Alone, any of these actions might have had an innocent explanation. Together, they formed a pattern investigators could not ignore. The shoe itself, the one Cunningham reported stolen, was now in the evidence room, linking him directly to the location where Tisha’s remains were found. On June 14, 2022, nearly two years after the identification of Tisha Bell’s remains, U.

S. Marshals arrested Prince Cunningham and charged him with two counts of first-degree murder. His bail was set at five million dollars. Nineteen years after Tisha’s disappearance, a name was finally attached to a criminal charge, but the legal path was far from over.

In 2024, prosecutors filed a motion to allow statements Tisha made before her death to be used at trial. The legal argument rested on a principle known as forfeiture by wrongdoing, the idea that a defendant loses the right to object to certain hearsay testimony if his own actions prevented the witness from testifying. To use the rule, the prosecution had to prove two separate things: that Cunningham was responsible for Tisha’s death, and that part of his motive was to prevent her from testifying against him in future legal proceedings. The trial court found the prosecution had proved the first claim but not the second.

There was insufficient evidence to establish that silencing a future witness specifically motivated him. The state appealed. The appellate court upheld the ruling. It was a setback for the prosecution, limiting the evidence they could present, but it was not fatal.

In May 2026, Prince Cunningham’s trial began at the Kane County Judicial Center, presided over by Judge Julia Yetter. Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser led the prosecution herself. In her opening statement, Mosser told the jury: “Today, we are here to finally answer the question of who killed Tisha Bell. The answer to that question is Prince Cunningham.

” Over the following days, the prosecution presented the case built over nearly two decades: the financial dispute, the false statements to police, the deliberate steps Cunningham took to avoid investigators. Jurors heard testimony confirming that Tisha had filed for child support against Cunningham, and that his wages had indeed been garnished before that arrangement was dropped. Tiffany James took the stand, repeating the account she had given police more than two decades earlier: Tisha argued with someone on the phone the night she disappeared. The prosecution returned to evidence that had existed in Cunningham’s own statements since 2003.

The shoe he told police was stolen from his car was the same shoe found seventeen years later beside Tisha’s remains. Cunningham’s defense offered a different version of events. His attorney told jurors that Aurora police had focused too narrowly on a single suspect, pointing to another man Tisha had been dating at the time, a person the defense claimed investigators never seriously pursued. In closing arguments, the defense emphasized that no firearm was ever found, and no evidence showed Cunningham had ever owned one.

His attorney told the jury this case was built on assumptions, not evidence. The prosecution responded that it was not assumptions holding the case together, but a pattern of documented lies and financial motive. The trial lasted several days before the case went to the jury. On May 27, 2026, a Kane County jury reached its verdict.

Prince Cunningham was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of Tisha Bell. Inside the Kane County Judicial Center, those present described the reading of the verdict as an emotional moment more than two decades in the making. Tisha’s family, who attended the trial, later told reporters they felt relief, the first real resolution they had received since 2003. The jury also reached a separate finding that Cunningham personally fired the weapon used to kill her, a decision that would carry significant weight in sentencing.

Outside the courtroom, State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser publicly praised the officers who had pursued the case over two decades: retired Sergeant Jim Corsey, Investigator Jeff Conings, Investigator John Moon, retired Lieutenant Greg Speith, and victim support officer Sheila Gray, who had supported Tisha’s family throughout the process. Before sentencing, Cunningham returned to court on July 31 for post-trial motions, a procedural step required after any felony conviction, giving the defense a final chance to challenge the verdict. On August 6, 2026, Judge Julia Yetter sentenced Prince Cunningham to seventy years with the Illinois Department of Corrections: forty-five years for the murder itself, plus a mandatory twenty-five-year enhancement because the jury found he personally fired the shot. Cunningham will serve the full sentence.

Speaking after the hearing, State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser addressed what the sentence represented. “This sentence fairly reflects the horrific choice Prince Cunningham made when he chose to end Tisha Bell’s life,” she said. “He deprived Tisha’s daughters of their mother, and he deprived her family of a sister and a daughter, and he did it out of pure selfishness. ” She added: “While no sentence can erase the pain this defendant caused, today’s outcome delivers the justice Tisha deserves.

”

Twenty-three years after Tisha Bell walked out of her apartment, the case that began as a missing person report reached its legal conclusion. The investigation never closed because someone kept returning to a file most people had long stopped thinking about. For Tisha Bell’s family, that persistence is the reason nineteen years of silence finally had a name attached to it.