‘Unknown Number: The High School Catfish’: Who’s behind the texts?

The new Netflix documentary Unknown Number: The High School Catfish dives into a chilling cyberstalking case that rattled the quiet town of Beal City, Mich.

In Oct. 2020, 13-year-old Lauryn Licari and her then-boyfriend, Owen McKenny, started receiving disturbing texts from an anonymous number. The messages were unsettling, but they eventually stopped. 

However, the texts returned with a vengeance in Sept. 2021, this time with even more vicious insults, graphic descriptions of sexual acts, and personal details. The harassment soon escalated into a daily campaign of psychological torment that lasted for more than a year.

Alarmed parents and overwhelmed school officials ultimately recruited authorities for help, and an investigation soon swept through the student body. Friends were accused, trust was destroyed, and no one felt safe.

When the truth finally emerged, the identity of the person behind the messages was a total shock to everyone. Here’s what really happened, including who was secretly terrorizing Lauryn and Owen.

Who was texting Lauryn Licari and Owen McKenny?

After months of investigating classmates and close friends, authorities were no closer to finding out who was tormenting Lauryn and Owen. But in Unknown Number, FBI liaison Brad Peter reveals how he discovered that some of the threatening messages had been sent via third-party app designed to mask phone numbers.

Tracing the digital footprint, Peter identified the source, and it was someone no one had expected: Lauryn’s mother, Kendra Licari.

As the documentary unfolds, it’s revealed that Kendra sent hundreds of anonymous messages calling her daughter “ugly” and “worthless.” She told Lauryn to “jump off a bridge,” and also sent several graphic messages describing sexual acts with Owen.

In body camera footage shown in the documentary, Isabella County Sheriff Mike Main confronts Kendra about her involvement at the Licari family home. There, Kendra confesses to sending the messages. She pleads with them not to reveal the truth to Lauryn or the public.

That wasn’t possible, as Kendra’s confession exonerated the other suspects, including Owen’s friend, Khloe Wilson, whose life was impacted dramatically by the false accusations.

“It was a very high, emotional day in our house,” Kendra says in a confessional. “A day of confusion, unknown answers, shock. A day of not even knowing how we move forward to the next day, so it was a hard day. But at the same time, it was an end.”

Kendra still insists that someone else was behind the original texts from October 2020. According to her, she was only behind the second wave of texts, though Lauryn says in the documentary that she suspects Kendra of having sent all of them.

Lauryn and her father, Shawn, eventually learned the truth. Body cam footage highlights the emotional moment when Shawn tells Kendra to leave their home, telling her they need to be separated for a while.

“I just can’t believe she would do something like that to her daughter, that supposedly she loved dearly,” he says in a confessional. “It just makes me sick.”

Lauryn, still attempting to process her mother’s actions, says she was “really confused” and couldn’t understand why her own mother would do something like this.

Owen’s mother, Jill, admits she felt disgusted and betrayed when she learned it was Kendra. “This woman we allowed into our lives, and our house, and my kids’ lives, and I just… you just cannot imagine what that felt like.”

Why did Kendra Licari cyberstalk her daughter?

Kendra offers a number of reasons for why she cyber-stalked Lauryn.

She asserts that her actions were rooted in unresolved trauma from her teenage years. In Unknown Number, she reflects on how watching Lauryn grow up triggered painful memories from her past, including how she was raped at 17. 

“As my daughter was hitting those teenage years, I got scared,” she says in the documentary. “I didn’t want her to go through that process that I did… and I think that really led to me not knowing how to handle things.”

She continues, “It was hard because I was reliving what I had been through, but also at the same time, wanting to protect her. I wanted to try to control the outcome of her journey. I was afraid of letting her grow up, wanting to protect her and keep her safe and keep her close.”

Per Kendra, the messages began as a strange and twisted attempt to stay close to Lauryn. But what started as a misguided attempt at connection spiraled out of control. “I was somebody different in those moments,” she says. “I was in an awful place mentally. It was like I had a mask on or something. I don’t even know who I was. … I let it consume me.”

Former Beal City Superintendent Bill Chillman offers his own interpretation in the documentary. He describes Kendra’s behavior as a cyber version of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental disorder defined by the National Library of Medicine as “either making up fake symptoms or causing real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick.”

“She wanted her daughter to need her in such a way that she was willing to hurt her, and this is the way she chose to do that versus physically trying to make her ill, which is typical Munchausen’s behavior,” says Chillman.

In Unknown Number, Kendra tries to justify her actions by framing them as a mistake. “Realistically, a lot of us have probably broken a law at some point or another and not gotten caught,” she says. “But again, if you get caught, you’re in the same situation I’m in but for a different thing.”

What happened to Lauryn and Kendra Licari?

Kendra was arrested in Dec. 2022 and later pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking a minor — one for Owen and one for Lauryn. In April 2023, she was sentenced to 19 months to five years in prison.

She was released on Aug. 8, 2024. At the time Unknown Number was filmed, Kendra had not yet reunited with Lauryn.

Lauryn hopes to rebuild her relationship with her mom, but says it will be “hard” to be around her. “Now that she’s out, I just want her to get the help she needs so then we can see each other, so it doesn’t go back to the old ways and how it was before,” she says.

Kendra says she’s “very disappointed” in herself. “I let my family down, I let myself down, and that’s hard,” she says. “That time frame in life is not who I am as a person. It’s not who I was, and it’s not who I am today.”

A closing title card reveals that Lauryn plans to study criminology in college.

Where can I watch Unknown Number: The High School Catfish?

Unknown Number: The High School Catfish is now streaming on Netflix.

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