High school can be difficult. But for Beal City, Michigan teenager Lauryn Licari, an already fraught period got even worse when she, and her then-boyfriend Owen McKenny, became the victims of a 20 month long harassment campaign.
Their story is told in the new Netflix documentary Unknown Number: The High School Catfish. Directed by Skye Borgman (Girl in the Picture, Abducted In Plan Sight, Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser), Unknown Number walks viewers through the emotional whirlwind that took Lauryn and Owen from normal high schoolers to stalking victims desperate to end their daily harassment. The messages, dozens of which were sent every day and attacked the teen’s relationship, looks, intelligence, clothing and behavior, were originally thought to be a mean spirited prank orchestrated by one of their high school classmates. But as the communications intensified, getting ruder, sexually explicit, and even telling Lauryn to kill herself, their parents — Dave and Jill McKenny and Shawn and Kendra Licari — begged anyone, school admin, law enforcement, even the FBI, for help. No one knew who the culprit was. (Spoilers ahead.)
The messages begin
“Before all of this, dating Owen, I was just having a good life. I loved life,” Lauryn says in the documentary. “[After] I would question what I wear to school, how I look, how’s my hair. It definitely affected how I thought about myself. My mom was like, ‘Just ignore them. Obviously you’re beautiful.’ She was just encouraging me to not read them.”
As Owen and Lauryn describe in the doc, the message began around October 2020. The two had been dating for close to a year, drawn together by their friendship and love of sports. Owen invited Lauryn to an annual Halloween party, but she wanted to stay home. Two weeks before the event, the two began receiving messages claiming Owen was breaking up with Lauryn and no longer liked her. “Not sure what he told you,” one of the messages read, “ but he is coming to Halloween party and we are both DTF.” The two asked around but brushed off the messages as a prank. Eleven months later, they started up again — and this time came faster than ever. Lauryn and Owen finally told their parents, who took their phones and began monitoring the messages. But they kept coming in, sometimes 30 to 50 messages every day. And while both Owen and Lauryn were getting text messages, most of the attacks were aimed solely at Lauryn.
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“When they showed me some of the text messages, I was astounded by how vitriolic they were,” Beal City High School principal Dan Boyer says in the film. “I’ve never seen this kind of volume in my career.”
The Investigation
Pressed by Jill and Kendra, the school began using surveillance video to see if they could link any students to the messages, either by the content or by catching them texting at the same time Owen and Lauryn were receiving messages. When this didn’t work, the teens both got new phone numbers, but continued receiving messages. “We were at the school almost every day,” Jill explains in the documentary. “I can’t tell you the countless times just standing in the principal’s office, in tears, going, ‘Can we please enforce a cellphone policy?’ Why does my kid have access to look at this when he should be learning?” Both Jill and Kendra say they were concerned about the contents of the messages, but also that the harassment and constant pressure would hurt Owen and Lauryn’s mental and emotional health. Eventually, the teenage couple broke up in the hopes that the texts would end, but they continued.
When the school administration was unable to find any perpetrators involved in the harassing text messages, the school district contacted the local sheriff’s department. The police investigation pulled several persons of interest, including schoolmate Khloe Wilson, Owen’s friend Sophie Weber, and Owen’s cousin Adrianna. But the girls denied sending the messages, and had the police search their phones for metadata, which didn’t bring up any links to the text messages.
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It was only when the Beal City Sheriff’s office requested assistance from the FBI Cyber Crimes unit that police were able to find leads on who was involved in the messages. The messages were sent through several unknown phone numbers, and FBI Liaison Bradley Peter linked one of them to Pinger, an app that allows you to send messages over wifi instead of through a traditional phone carrier. (It can also be used to help people disguise their real phone number.) When the FBI filed a search warrant, Pinger released the associated IP addresses, which were eventually traced back to a surprise suspect: Lauryn’s mother Kendra.
L to R) Kendra Licari, and Lauryn in Unknown Number: The High School Catfish.
Netflix
The surprise perpetrator
The documentary shows the body camera footage from the day police confronted Kendra. Lauryn’s mother originally denied the accusations, but then calmly confessed to police, saying that she did not send the original messages and only started texting to try and find out the first perpetrator, but then kept sending them. She also revealed that she had lost both of her jobs, and had been lying to Lauryn and Lauryn’s father Shawn. Kendra participated in the documentary, where she acknowledges that she made a mistake, but says that many people judge her unfairly. “Realistically, a lot of us have probably broken the law at some point or another and not gotten caught. I’m sure people drove drunk, haven’t been caught,” Kendra says in the documentary. “As my daughter was hitting those teenage years, I got scared. I was afraid of letting her grow up.”
According to Today, Kendra was charged with two counts of stalking a minor, two counts of communicating with another to commit a crime and one count of obstruction of justice. During her 2023 trial, she pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking a minor and apologized to Owen and his family, spending 19 months in prison before her release on Aug. 8, 2024. Lauryn, now 18, still isn’t allowed to see her, but says she’s conflicted about her feelings on it. “Now that she’s out, I just want her to get the help she needs, so when we see each other, it doesn’t go back to the old ways and the way it was before,” Lauryn says in the documentary. “I love her more than anything.”
The Online Reaction
Since Unknown Number premiered on Aug. 29, internet users have been shocked at the late reveal that Kendra admitted she was responsible for the large majority of the harassing messages sent to Owen and Lauryn, especially since she was seemingly heavily involved in the investigation with both school administration and police. The documentary has continued to grow in popularity, replacing hit animated film KPop Demon Hunters at the top of Netflix’s Top 10 Movies List.
Audience reaction seems heavily centered around confusion with Kendra’s actions. While the documentary doesn’t reveal that Kendra was responsible until almost an hour in, many viewers continue to wonder why Kendra participated at all — and the disconnect required to say you love your daughter more than anything, and still send her vicious messages telling her to end her life.
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Each of the people involved in the harassment case have different theories on why Kendra sent the messages to Owen and Lauryn. Jill believes Kendra was obsessed with Owen in a way that went beyond his relationship with Lauryn. Others, like Beal City superintendent Bill Chillman, believe that the text messages were an odd manifestation of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. “She wanted her daughter to need her in such a way that she was willing to hurt her,” Chillman says in the documentary. “And this is the way she chose to do that versus physically trying to make her ill, which is typical Munchausen behavior.” Even Kendra is confused, saying several times in the documentary that she’s still not sure why she did it. But for director Borgman, that confusion is a part of the story that might always remain unanswered.
“Kendra is a little bit of an enigma. I think that she had a lot of time to think about what she did. She was in therapy when she was incarcerated, and I believe that she’s still seeing a therapist,” Borgman told Variety in September. “She has put thought into what she did. I don’t know that she’s fully realized or recognized what it was that she did or why she did it. I guess only Kendra could really answer that.”
