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In speaking recently with uber-talented writer and actor Kanika Batra about her new crime thriller Honeytrap which interweaves the story of fictional serial killer Maris Caldwell with that of real-life one Ted Bundy, a thought kept pounding against my noggin just as disturbing as it is true: “Sometimes we need the Kanika Batra’s and the Robert Graysmith’s to navigate the murky depths of the human soul in order to come to any sort of proper understanding of the unfathomable and the horrid.”
In Batra’s recently released Honeytrap, the year 1974 comes back to life in bright and disturbing clarity as the author weaves a taut web that, while one part fiction, illuminates the disturbing story of Ted Bundy, a person whose actual victim count is so high that we’ll probably never know the full extent of his bloody rampage that – officially – ran from the early 70s until 1978. During that time, the infamous serial killer took the lives of at least thirty people across seven different states, leaving in his wake a nightmare for countless families of his victims. It’s not pretty stuff and, as Morgan Freeman’s fictional Detective Somerset noted in the serial killer thriller Se7en, “Even the most promising clues usually only lead to others.”
Altruistic souls such as Batra know that the Freeman quote above is true; that what they’re really doing is not so much offering up any type of a “eureka” moment that will explain away just why Bundy did what he did but instead are acting as custodians for a dark corner in our history. Not because they necessarily want to, but because, instead, they need to. And we need them to because really, who else will do it? They’re collecting the shattered pieces left behind by Bundy’s destructive wake and assembling their findings as a warning for just how seemingly random and inexplicable such violence and mayhem actually is. Real evil isn’t always choreographed with a demented Busby Berkely panache: Real evil can approach you as a next door neighbor, a seemingly benign smile, a helpful hand with a too-full bag of groceries. And that’s where true horror rests.
From her home in Australia via my trusty landline here in the States, this reporter chatted with Batra, a twenty-six year old true-crime sleuth and also one of the leading experts on the so-called “Campus Killer” Ted Bundy. Right away, I can tell that her work on Honeytrap is no mere trifle; Kanika Batra is the real deal, a researcher par excellence whose breadth of knowledge on Bundy is nothing short of astounding. No mere armchair historian content to rest on the laurels of past researchers, Batra has done her due diligence in investigating nearly every nook and cranny of the Ted Bundy story.
“My work on Honeytrap spanned five years,” the diminutive author tells me breathlessly between assorted facts and truisms on the Bundy case that she rattles off to me at breakneck speed. Batra speaks in that easy and confident way only someone who has indeed done their legwork on anything, let alone one of the greatest crime stories of the 20th Century, can successfully do. So I listen intently, my attention to her being that of a small child sitting around a midnight campfire being regaled with ghost stories. Only these stories are sobering and true.
“During those five years, I personally spent hundreds of hours of research on Ted Bundy and interviewed and spoken with many of the actual police officers that investigated his murders,” Batra continues. She’s got me now. I’m nothing if not a sucker for hands-on field work when looking into any aspect of the history and events of our world. Batra then goes into detail on the Ted Bundy case and how it has so shaped her own path not only as an investigative writer, but as a human being.
Ted Bundy’s first suspected murder is precisely that: Suspected. No one knows for sure whether or not the innocuous Bundy was indeed the person who murdered Ann Marie Burr, although evidence and circumstance positions him as a genuine contender in the death of the eight year old back in the late summer of 1961 when he would have been fourteen years old. “Ted did not like to talk about any of the children he potentially had a hand in killing,” Batra informs me, a chill running down my spine. Adding to the fog that surrounds his early years is the self-mythologizing the serial killer wove like an impenetrable wall; Bundy was akin to a politician run amok, telling different stories to different people as it best suited him, sewing a line of distortion and contradictions as he merrily bounced along, drunk on his own TV movie of the week notoriety. Did he, as he revealed to a psychologist in later years, begin his dance with the devil in 1969 with the murder of two women in Atlantic City, New Jersey or was his dark path paved sometime in 1971 in the Emerald City known as Seattle? The man’s body count ran high and perhaps even he mixed up the dates and the victim’s after enough time had gone by. By the time Bundy tangoed with the electric chair in early 1989, all anyone really knew was that he had officially confessed to thirty murders, although the actual count is probably way higher than even that jaw-dropping number. Regarded by some looky-loos as handsome and charming, this diabolical madman ultimately took his final tally number of victim’s to the grave, leaving behind the faint echoes of many more nameless women he had victimized, assaulted, raped and murdered.
Kanika Batra catches me up to speed on all of this and tells me of the challenges she faced dropping in her fictional counterpart to Bundy in Honeytrap, anti-heroine Maris Caldwell. She also reveals just how deep and extensive her research went into that time and place, at times negating certain passages she had already laid out and written into her novel, forcing her to double back around and rewrite entire sections of the book that might contradict a fictional tidbit she had lain out going off of earlier, erroneous information as presented by other historians and investigators. With painstaking precision, Batra plied away at Honeytrap, simultaneously creating something uniquely new and bringing back to life some of the painful realities of Bundy’s reign of terror. It is a breathtaking tapestry, one drawn from many sources along with her own tireless footwork: Books on Bundy, documentaries and movies such as Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile which featured actor Zac Efron.
“One of the best and most difficult things has been the online community that avidly follows every little detail on Ted Bundy,” Batra reveals, citing the armchair critics who are quick to pounce when so tightly married to their own pet theories and suppositions that any deviation from those paths puts them very much up-in-arms. Although noting voluminous well-wishers and online benefactors who are a boon to the online sleuth community, Batra is obviously weary of the small but quite vocal lot who feel a strange sense of territoriality over the serial killer. To that end, the diligent and tireless author put her head down and burrowed on along, following wherever the so-called truth might lie, determined to write her book her way. It’s a working practice that has served her in good stead, so much so that she’s looking to dive back into the world of true crime yet again, this time with the Jeffrey Epstein case, a crime that has left a different type of victim. “There’s more to the story I think than has been reported on,” the astute crime-sleuth tells me. I nod, knowing that the woman who briefly illuminated the Ted Bundy case stands to reconfigure and shine a uranium glow on Epstein, the wake of tragedy and destruction left in his wake and a still unresolved death. And I think the same salient thought now as I did at the front of my interview with writer and actor Kanika Batra: “Sometimes we just need the Kanika Batra’s and the Robert Graysmith’s to navigate the murky depths of the human soul…”
