Author | Robert Beattie |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | True crime |
Publisher | Penguin Books |
Publication date | 2005 |
Publication place | United States |
Published in English | 2005 |
Pages | 352 pp |
ISBN | 0-451-21738-1 |
Nightmare in Wichita: The Hunt for the BTK Strangler by lawyer Robert Beattie is a non-fiction book about a serial killer in Wichita, Kansas, known as the BTK Strangler. The book debuted at No. 4 on The New York Times bestseller list upon its April 2005 release. [1]
Dennis Rader, a city compliance officer and church council president working in Park City, just north of Wichita, was ultimately arrested, charged and convicted of the crimes. Beattie, who lives in Wichita, compiled the book based on interviews with police officers and detectives familiar with the case. Rader's capture, on February 25, 2005, happened just as the book was in the final stages of editing. An addendum about Rader and his arrest was added before the book went to press.
Many, including some Wichita police officers, have speculated that the fact that a book about BTK was being written was what caused the killer to reemerge in 2004, which led to his arrest the following year. [2] Beattie researched the book for two years. [3]
In its review, TruTV's "Crime Library" criticized the book for filling up "many, many pages with (the author's) meetings with various individuals that clearly interested Beattie, but are likely to bore readers." But the article also credited the book for including "quite a bit of detail that never got into the newspapers." [4]
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial killer and sex offender who killed and dismembered seventeen men and boys between 1978 and 1991. Many of his later murders involved necrophilia, cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeleton.
Sedgwick County is located in the U.S. state of Kansas. Its county seat is Wichita, the most populous city in the state. As of the 2020 census, the population was 523,824, making it the second-most populous county in Kansas. The county was named for John Sedgwick, the highest ranking Union general killed during the American Civil War.
The Hillside Strangler, later the Hillside Stranglers, is the media epithet for one, later discovered to be two, American serial killers who terrorized Los Angeles, California, between October 1977 and February 1978, with the nicknames originating from the fact that many of the victims' bodies were discovered in the hills surrounding the city.
The Boston Strangler is the name given to the murderer of 13 women in Greater Boston during the early 1960s. The crimes were attributed to Albert DeSalvo based on his confession, on details revealed in court during a separate case, and DNA evidence linking him to the final victim.
Dennis Lynn Rader, also known as BTK, is an American serial killer who murdered at least ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. Although he occasionally killed or attempted to kill men and children, Rader typically targeted women. His victims were often bound, sometimes with objects from their homes, and either suffocated with a plastic bag or manually strangled with a ligature. In addition, he stole keepsakes from his female victims, including underwear, driver's licenses and personal items.
Robert Emmet Chambers Jr. is an American criminal. Dubbed the Preppy Killer and the Central Park Strangler, Chambers gained notoriety for the August 26, 1986, strangulation death of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in New York City's Central Park, for which he was originally charged with second degree murder. Chambers changed his story several times during the course of the ensuing investigation, ultimately claiming that Levin's death was the accidental result of him pushing her off of him as she purportedly sexually assaulted him, an account that was characterized by media accounts as one of "rough sex". Chambers later pleaded guilty to manslaughter after a jury failed to reach a verdict after nine days of deliberation.
KAKE is a television station in Wichita, Kansas, United States, affiliated with ABC and owned by Lockwood Broadcast Group. The station's studios are located on West Street in northwestern Wichita, and its transmitter is located in rural northwestern Sedgwick County.
KSAS-TV is a television station in Wichita, Kansas, United States, affiliated with Fox and MyNetworkTV. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which provides certain services to Hutchinson-licensed Dabl affiliate KMTW under a local marketing agreement (LMA) with Mercury Broadcasting Company. The two stations share studios on West Street in northwestern Wichita; KSAS-TV's transmitter is located in rural northwestern Sedgwick County.
Robert Beattie, an American, Wichita-based, lawyer, is the author of the non-fiction book Nightmare in Wichita.
Robert Roy Hazelwood was a former FBI profiler of sex crimes. He worked for much of his career for the FBI, retiring in the mid-1990s.
The Hunt for the BTK Killer is a 2005 American biographical horror television film directed by Stephen T. Kay. First shown on CBS on October 9, 2005, it is based on the true story of Dennis Rader, the notorious "BTK Killer" who murdered 10 people from 1974 to 1991. Though the events take place in Wichita, Kansas, the film was made in Nova Scotia.
David Lohr is an American journalist who has written about and interviewed many of the world's most notorious criminals.
Michael Eldon Burgess is an American actor known for his sinister television portrayal of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer.
The Wichita Police Department (WPD) is the primary law enforcement agency serving Wichita, Kansas. Wichita Police Department’s jurisdiction overlaps with the Sedgwick County Sheriff's office.
Gary Ray Bowles was an American serial killer who was executed in 2019 for the murders of six men in 1994. He is sometimes referred to as The I-95 Killer since most of his victims lived close to the Interstate 95 highway.
A Good Marriage is a novella by American writer Stephen King, published in the collection Full Dark, No Stars (2010).
High Technology Crime Investigation Association (HTCIA) is an international non-profit professional organization devoted to the prevention, investigation, and prosecution of crimes involving advanced technologies. Author and cybercrime expert, Christopher Brown, described HTCIA as "one of the largest and most respected" associations of its kind.
Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (2004) is a non-fiction true crime history by Peter Vronsky, a criminal justice historian. It surveys the history of serial homicide, its culture, psychopathology, and investigation from the Roman Empire to the early 2000s. The book describes the rise of serial murder from its first early recorded instances in ancient Rome to medieval and Renaissance Europe, and Victorian Britain, and its rise and escalation in the United States and elsewhere in the world, in the postmodern era. The book also surveys a range of theoretical approaches to serial killers interspersed with dozens of detailed case studies of both notorious and lesser known serial murderers, illustrating the theory in practice. Considered by some a definitive history of serial homicide, this was the book serial killer Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, was reading when he was arrested in 2005.
Mindhunter is an American psychological crime thriller television series created by Joe Penhall, based on the 1995 true-crime book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker. The series debuted in 2017 and ran for two seasons. Executive producers included Penhall, Charlize Theron, and David Fincher, the latter of whom served as the series' most frequent director and de facto showrunner, overseeing many of the scriptwriting and production processes. The series stars Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv, and follows the founding of the Behavioral Science Unit in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the late 1970s and the beginning of criminal profiling.
Francis Donald Nemechek is an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped, and murdered four women and a young boy in Kansas between 1974 and 1976. He admitted to committing the murders but claimed to be insane and thus should not be tried criminally. He was nevertheless tried and found guilty, receiving a sentence of life imprisonment with a chance of parole, although each of his applications have been declined.