{"id":14467,"date":"2025-09-10T18:54:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T18:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/14467\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T18:54:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T18:54:09","slug":"unknown-number-the-catfish-case-capturing-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/14467\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Unknown Number:\u2019 The Catfish Case Capturing The Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tHigh 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<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tTheir story is told in the new Netflix documentary<\/a> Unknown Number<\/a>: The High School Catfish<\/a>. Directed by Skye Borgman (Girl in the Picture, Abducted In Plan Sight, Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser<\/a>), Unknown Number walks viewers through the emotional whirlwind that took Lauryn and Owen from normal high schoolers to stalking victims<\/a> desperate to end their daily harassment<\/a>. The messages, dozens of which were sent every day and attacked the teen\u2019s relationship, looks, intelligence, clothing and behavior, were originally thought to be a mean spirited prank<\/a> 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 \u2014\u00a0Dave and Jill McKenny and Shawn and Kendra Licari \u2014\u00a0begged anyone, school admin, law enforcement, even the FBI, for help. No one knew who the culprit was. (Spoilers ahead.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tThe messages begin\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBefore all of this, dating Owen, I was just having a good life. I loved life,\u201d Lauryn says in the documentary. \u201c[After] I would question what I wear to school, how I look, how\u2019s my hair. It definitely affected how I thought about myself. My mom was like, \u2018Just ignore them. Obviously you\u2019re beautiful.\u2019 She was just encouraging me to not read them.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs 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. \u201cNot sure what he told you,\u201d one of the messages read, \u201c but he is coming to Halloween party and we are both DTF.\u201d The two asked around but brushed off the messages as a prank. Eleven months later, they started up again \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen they showed me some of the text messages, I was astounded by how vitriolic they were,\u201d Beal City High School principal Dan Boyer says in the film. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen this kind of volume in my career.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tThe Investigation\t<\/p>\n

\n\tPressed 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\u2019t work, the teens both got new phone numbers, but continued receiving messages. \u201cWe were at the school almost every day,\u201d Jill explains in the documentary. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you the countless times just standing in the principal\u2019s office, in tears, going, \u2018Can we please enforce a cellphone policy?\u2019 Why does my kid have access to look at this when he should be learning?\u201d 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\u2019s mental and emotional health. Eventually, the teenage couple broke up in the hopes that the texts would end, but they continued.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen the school administration was unable to find any perpetrators involved in the harassing text messages, the school district contacted the local sheriff\u2019s department. The police investigation pulled several persons of interest, including schoolmate Khloe Wilson, Owen\u2019s friend Sophie Weber, and Owen\u2019s cousin Adrianna. But the girls denied sending the messages, and had the police search their phones for metadata, which didn\u2019t bring up any links to the text messages.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was only when the Beal City Sheriff\u2019s 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 <\/a>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\u2019s mother Kendra.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tL to R) Kendra Licari, and Lauryn in Unknown Number: The High School Catfish.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNetflix<\/p>\n

\t\tThe surprise perpetrator\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThe documentary shows the body camera footage<\/a> from the day police confronted Kendra. Lauryn\u2019s 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\u2019s father Shawn. Kendra participated in the documentary, where she acknowledges that she made a mistake, but says that many people judge her unfairly.\u00a0 \u201cRealistically, a lot of us have probably broken the law at some point or another and not gotten caught. I\u2019m sure people drove drunk, haven\u2019t been caught,\u201d Kendra says in the documentary. \u201cAs my daughter was hitting those teenage years, I got scared. I was afraid of letting her grow up.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to Today<\/a>, 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\u2019t allowed to see her, but says she\u2019s conflicted about her feelings on it. \u201cNow that she\u2019s out, I just want her to get the help she needs, so when we see each other, it doesn\u2019t go back to the old ways and the way it was before,\u201d Lauryn says in the documentary. \u201cI love her more than anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tThe Online Reaction\t<\/p>\n

\n\tSince 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 <\/a>at the top of Netflix\u2019s Top 10 Movies List.<\/p>\n

\n\tAudience reaction seems heavily centered around confusion with Kendra\u2019s actions. While the documentary doesn\u2019t reveal that Kendra was responsible until almost an hour in, many viewers continue to wonder why Kendra participated at all \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tEach 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. \u201cShe wanted her daughter to need her in such a way that she was willing to hurt her,\u201d Chillman says in the documentary. \u201cAnd this is the way she chose to do that versus physically trying to make her ill, which is typical Munchausen behavior.\u201d Even Kendra is confused, saying several times in the documentary that she\u2019s still not sure why she did it. But for director Borgman, that confusion is a part of the story that might always remain unanswered.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cKendra 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\u2019s still seeing a therapist,\u201d Borgman told Variety<\/a> in September. \u201cShe has put thought into what she did. I don\u2019t know that she\u2019s fully realized or recognized what it was that she did or why she did it. I guess only Kendra could really answer that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"High school can be difficult. But for Beal City, Michigan teenager Lauryn Licari, an already fraught period got…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[4063,859,156,409,111,139,69,16726],"class_list":{"0":"post-14467","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-catfish","9":"tag-documentary","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-unknown-number"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}