Kanika Batra, a 26-year-old Australian beauty queen, would seem like the last person to pen down anything on the world’s notorious killer, Ted Bundy. Bundy was executed 32 years ago on 24th January 1989 for stalking, raping and mutilating women throughout a horrifying period in the 1970s.

However, her fascination for the man runs so deep that she has penned down a fictional novel, Honeytrap, which reimagines Bundy’s monstrous crimes with a twist. In an interview, she spoke about her work as she said, “It’s really deranged. My character is quite incredibly sadistic and a complete parallel to Ted Bundy. I was terrified re-reading it sometimes.”

In the psychological thriller, Bundy has a competition in the form of a seductive female hotel heiress who moonlights as a mass murderer. Bundy develops a relationship with the lady killer, stalking her own victims in a series of similar perverse slayings that play out alongside Bundy’s heinous history in 1974 Seattle.

Kanika was a finalist for Miss World Australia in 2018 and 2020 and placed in the top 10 for Miss Universe New Zealand 2019. With her work, Batra knows that she will be criticized for exploiting real-life tragedies.

“People don’t expect it because they have this image in their minds of girls who do pageants being really stupid or vapid. It’s a shock to most people that I mainly compete in pageants as well”, she said as she explained how her friends were also shocked she wrote something so disturbing. It sure seems like Kanika knows what she’s doing and might as well be seen in the pageant circle again this year.