John Richardson was supposed to be dropped off at his girlfriend’s house. Instead, detectives say, his path ended in a wooded area where he was later found buried.
FORT WORTH, Texas — The case against two Fort Worth-area men begins with an ordinary plan that never happened: police say John Richardson left a party on Nov. 30 expecting a ride to his girlfriend’s home, but he never arrived and was found three weeks later in a shallow grave.
That focus on Richardson’s final intended destination gives the case its urgency. The victim was 24, was last seen alive among acquaintances and then disappeared into a sequence of shifting stories that detectives say did not match the evidence. Months later, with Chase Cook now arrested alongside Alexander James Nicholas, both 23, the case has become a study in how a young man’s last known movements, and the people around him, turned into the central proof in a homicide prosecution.
Police say Richardson was reported missing on Dec. 2 after those close to him realized he had never made it to his girlfriend’s house in White Settlement. That missed arrival became the hinge point in the investigation. Instead of a routine missing-person search, detectives quickly treated the case as suspicious after early interviews. They learned Richardson had left the party with Nicholas, who later told officers he had dropped him off alive somewhere near Alliance Boulevard and the Buc-ee’s on Interstate 35W. The state’s case now rests in large part on the claim that this account was false. Investigators say witness statements and phone records contradicted it, moving the case away from uncertainty and toward homicide.
The people who last saw Richardson with Nicholas became some of the first key witnesses. One person told detectives Nicholas had displayed a silver-and-black handgun before leaving the party. Another said Nicholas later declared that Richardson “wouldn’t be coming around anymore.” According to the affidavit, when that friend asked what he meant, Nicholas made a gun shape with his hand and nodded yes when asked if he had killed Richardson. A second witness said Nicholas seemed angry about an earlier car accident that he blamed on Richardson and had asked at the party whether Richardson “should get home safe.” Those statements did not place witnesses at the killing, but they changed how detectives viewed the disappearance of a man who had simply been expected home.
The search for Richardson ended on Dec. 22 in a wooded area of Fort Worth located in Denton County. Detectives said they got there after reviewing phone records showing Nicholas in that area after stopping at Cook’s home. Richardson’s phone also went silent there, police said. When homicide detectives searched the wooded stretch, they found his body in a shallow grave. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office later determined that Richardson died from multiple stab wounds, defensive wounds and blunt-force trauma to the head. The findings turned the case from a disappearance into a killing with signs of struggle, and they gave a stark answer to what had happened to the man who never completed that ride.
Cook’s arrest months later added a second chapter to Richardson’s final-hours story. Detectives said Cook initially told them he was drunk and could not remember whether anyone else was in the car when he met Nicholas that night. When asked where Richardson was, police said, Cook became tearful and did not answer. He also refused consent to search his phone, investigators wrote. After police obtained a warrant, they said the phone showed him in the same area as Nicholas and Richardson during the critical time. That evidence, detectives argued, pushed Cook from the edge of the story to the middle of it.
Then came the account that tied the case most directly to the burial itself. Cook’s girlfriend told detectives that he left home in the middle of the night after getting a message saying he needed to “go help Alex” and that he returned only later the next day. A few days after that, while drinking, she said, Cook told her he and Nicholas had dug a six-foot hole in the woods that night. To investigators, the statement mattered not just because of what it described, but because it suggested knowledge of the burial before that detail was broadly known. It is one of the clearest allegations in the record that someone besides Nicholas took part in what happened after Richardson disappeared.
The case still leaves Richardson’s last moments partly hidden. Police have not publicly described the exact place where he was attacked or identified a murder weapon. Local reporting has also noted that no blood evidence was described in the vehicle believed to have been used to give him a ride. That means the prosecution will likely have to reconstruct the crime from movement, statements and after-the-fact conduct rather than from a single public forensic reveal. Even so, the larger narrative remains consistent across the available reporting: Richardson left with people he knew, never made it to where he was supposed to go and was later found buried in a place the suspects’ phones had reached.
Nicholas was arrested in late December after a warrant was issued Dec. 24, and he is being held on $300,000 bond. Cook was later arrested after a warrant issued March 16, and he is being held on $250,000 bond. Both are charged with murder. The next phase is likely to center on court hearings, additional filings and any fuller account from prosecutors about how they believe Richardson’s final trip turned from a promised ride into a fatal encounter and burial.
For now, what defines the case is not only where detectives say Richardson was found, but where he never got to go. The gap between those two places has become the heart of a murder prosecution that now names two defendants and still leaves some of the most important minutes of Richardson’s final night to be filled in by the courts.
Author note: Last updated April 9, 2026.