Netflix’s latest true crime documentary, Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, delves into the rising crime of cyberbullying.
Except, there’s one huge twist – the perpetrator at the centre of the documentary turned out to be the victim’s very own mother.
Michigan teen Lauryn Licari and her boyfriend, Owen, were just 13 years old when they started receiving threatening messages in October 2020.
After a brief hiatus, the messages started again in September 2021, unravelling into a 15-month campaign of daily threats and insults.
When the couple’s concerned parents and teachers involved the police, Bradley Peter was brought in from another area to investigate and act as liaison officer to the FBI – who also got involved.
It wasn’t long before he identified the culprit – Lauryn’s mother, Kendra Licari. Kendra pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking a minor and was sentenced to prison in 2022. We take a look at what happened to her in the aftermath of her crimes.
Where is Kendra Licari now?
Kendra was released from prison on parole on August 8, 2024, and remains in Michigan under supervision until February 2026. Part of her plea deal states she is currently not allowed any contact with Lauryn.
Kendra’s husband, Shawn Licari, divorced her when her crimes came to light, gaining full custody of Lauryn, who is now 18. When director Skye Borgman first approached Lauryn about making the documentary, the teen was hoping to regain a relationship with her mother.
However, by the time shooting it reached a conclusion, Lauryn had reflected and was unsure about how to approach this. She wants her Kendra to get the right help, and suggests she’ll know when the time is right to try and contact her mom in the future.
Agreeing to appear in the documentary, Kendra denies being behind the initial round of messages sent to her daughter in 2020. Instead, she suggests she began sending the ones that started in 2021 as a ploy to find out who sent the first ones.
“I was sending messages in the hopes that they might send back asking, ‘Is this so-and-so?’ I started with the thought, ‘We need some answers.’ And then it just kept going,” Kendra says in the documentary.
(Image credit: Netflix)
Between September 2021 and February 2022, Kendra sent as many as 40 to 50 text messages a day, many of which were threatening or sexually explicit.
She used apps that generated new phone numbers each time she sent a message, meaning Lauryn and Owen were unable to block the numbers.
Even the police initially struggled to identify the source of the texts. It took the FBI to get involved, who subpoenaed the app company’s phone records and carried out an analysis of all the numbers used to send messages, in the hope of identifying an IP address linking all the numbers together.
When they achieved this, the IP address was matched to Kendra. When police arrived at their house to confront her, Lauryn and Shawn were horrified to find out she had been behind the abuse all along.
Despite everything that’s happened, Kendra remains optimistic about her future with Lauryn. “We both know that we’re with each other no matter what. I definitely think we can have a healthy relationship. I know we both hold that bond that we have close,” she says.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.womanandhome.com ’
