The New York Times & USA Today bestseller
Nightmare in Wichita: The Hunt for the BTK Strangler

This true crime book was completed in 2004 months before the killer was caught. After Dennis Rader was charged there was a quick edit, an added epilogue, and Nightmare was published a week later in March 2005. It immediately became a bestseller. BTK Killer Dennis Rader, who murdered ten people and taunted and terrorized the Wichita community for 31-years, was sentenced to 175-years in prison. This book served as the basis for the made-for-television movie The Hunt for the BTK Killer and the story inspired dozens of film, television, and print reports and fictionalizations.

"Robert Beattie did not write a book about Dennis Rader.  His book manuscript went to the publisher fully four months before Dennis Rader was arrested.  The title of that book, written in the contract and shown on CNN's Larry King Live, was "Secrets Long Hidden."  That title was later changed to "Nightmare in Wichita."  As the sub-title of that version and the published version declares, the book was about "The Hunt for the BTK Strangler" by law enforcement, by investigative journalists, and by amateur sleuths.  It was to be published in the summer of 2005.  That book began and ended with the same sentence: "He's still out there."  It was a scary book about an uncaught serial killer who had taunted the public via phoned and written messages for thirty-one years. 

In 2003-2004 Beattie's BTK book queries and proposals were rejected by sixteen commercial publishing companies and literary agents.  The BTK story was then largely forgotten or unknown to the public.  Then BTK resurfaced in March 2004.  In April 2004, Jake Elwell became Beattie's literary agent and quickly made book and movie deals.

In March 2005, the day after Dennis Rader was charged, the publisher made a decision to not wait until summer, but to publish the book immediately.  In less than 48-hours Robert Beattie conducted interviews and wrote the epilogue, which contains the only reference to Dennis Rader.  The publisher, New American Library-Penguin, made editorial changes, such as eliminating references to "He's still out there" to avoid confusing readers who might think BTK was not arrested.  Two weeks later the book was being sold in bookstores nationwide.

The author, Robert Beattie, did not set out to write a true crime book or become a true crime author.  From the 1970s to the time of this writing in 2010, he has worked variously as a firefighter-medic, a hospital orderly, aircraft factory machinist, appellate and trial lawyer (and pro bono special counsel to several non-profit organizations), building complex and mall maintenance man, legislative intern and political operative, and university instructor in social science departments, but always he wrote, either reports for business or government or for publication. 

In 1974 at age seventeen Beattie became a paid newspaper columnist.  He wrote his first novel, a still unpublished science fiction-fantasy story, when he was age eighteen.  In 1975 he was paid to write for a religious magazine.  In 1998, building on ideas that had been percolating for nearly a quarter-century, he wrote a still unpublished religious novel, Jesus' Jurors.

In the 1980s he became a prize-winning playwright with his play Fire Escape.  He kept writing and pitching commercial stories and kept being published, but mostly in trade, professional, or academic periodicals.  He had several peer-reviewed scholarly papers published on the space program in the academic The Case for Mars series.  He was then best known as a space science writer. 

While attending law school he wrote a published series of articles about lawyers not usually thought of as lawyers, such as Copernicus and Francis Bacon.  In the 1990s he wrote the lead articles in two issues of the "Journal of the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association" on polygraph law, and a lead article on the jury system in the "Newman Review."  He was then known as a legal writer. 

Beattie wrote the feature article in the millennium edition of the MENSA High IQ Society glossy periodical the "BULLETIN."  The article was titled "The Best Books of the Twentieth Century."  (That was January 2001, which Mensa insisted was the first month of the new millennium, not January 2000.)  Based on feedback received from that article, he was then known as a literary critic. 

What became his first true crime book, Nightmare in Wichita: The Hunt for the BTK Strangler, went through seven distinct stages over three years as he wrote it, then the earlier referenced final stage for publication.  In 1997 he wrote the textbook for a senior level university course he taught, Political Science 4883 The American Jury.  Each semester he would write additional documents to supplement the textbook, each on that semester's mock trials.  In 2003 he wrote a 31-page academic supplement on the then unsolved BTK case.  He directed his students in that 2003 class to use that document as a resource in their classroom roles as mock investigative grand jurors.  During the class his students, acting as investigators, interviewed victim's families, retired investigators, and current investigators including Lt. Ken Landwehr. 

During the book's evolution from academic to commercial, the author was advised to write it in first-person similar to the other available existing book about a long uncaught American serial killer, Zodiac by Robert Graysmith, which he did.

After being published in March 2005, Nightmare in Wichita was on the main or extended New York Times non-fiction trade paperback bestseller list for nine weeks.  It inspired the television movie The Hunt for the BTK Killer, the first draft written by Tom Towler, final draft by Donald Martin.  The late Maury Chaykin portrayed Robert Beattie in that movie. 

In 2006, Robert Beattie met with feature film writer Gregory Allen Howard, author of Remember the Titans among other works, who wrote the screenplay for Factor X, another BTK movie in development.

The recommended book about the BTK case written after Dennis Rader was sentenced is Carlton Smith's 2006 The BTK Murders: Inside the 'Bind Torture Kill' Case that Terrified America's Heartland.

The only book by an author who interviewed Dennis Rader is John Douglas with Johnny Dodd's 2007 Inside the Mind of BTK."