Warning: This story contains spoilers for “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish.”
Every so often, Netflix releases a sleeper hit that becomes everyone’s favorite new obsession. This past week, it was a true crime documentary with one of the most bizarre plot twists in recent memory.
“Unknown Number: The High School Catfish,” currently the top movie on the streamer, follows the mysterious case of a teenage girl, Lauryn Licari, and her boyfriend, Owen McKenny, from a small high school in Beal City, Michigan, who were viciously cyberstalked by an unknown number for months in 2020, seemingly in an attempt to break them up.
At first, the texts were mild, like one that read, “Hi Lauryn, Owen is breaking up with you.” Another read, “He no longer likes you and hasn’t liked you for a while. It’s obvious he wants me.”
The teenage couple thought it might just be a prank. But then the messages got more aggressive and extremely graphic in nature, even escalating to physical threats. They eventually turned into a full-out harassment campaign, with upward of 40 to 50 texts being sent to Licari and McKenny at all hours of the day and night.
This went on for roughly two years; however, the teens’ parents became involved after the first few months, once they learned how severe the situation had become, and alerted the school principal and local authorities. But by then, they realized that they weren’t dealing with the average cyberbullying case — this one hit much closer to home.
It appeared that the person behind the texts was someone close to Licari and McKenny who knew intimate details about them and their relationship. Their parents were determined to find the leak in their circle, and so most of the Netflix documentary plays like a guessing game of sorts to figure out who could possibly be the culprit.
In addition to Licari, McKenny and their parents, their fellow schoolmates — some of whom were under suspicion — were all interviewed on camera about this catfish scheme and how it spun so out of control that the FBI eventually got involved.
The assumption was that one of Licari or McKenny’s classmates was the cyberbully, even from a viewer standpoint. But the person everyone least suspected turned out to be the perpetrator all along — Licari’s own mother, Kendra Licari.
To the doc’s credit, no one could’ve seen that plot twist coming from the way Kendra Licari was interviewed throughout the doc. To an unsuspecting person, she seemed like a concerned parent trying to get to the bottom of the text mystery, just like all the other adults involved. However, an IP address tracked by the FBI eventually led right back to Kendra Licari, and from there, she confessed.
It was a pretty shocking reveal, to say the least. And even though the case made national headlines in 2023 after she pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking and was sentenced to 19 months to five years in prison, viewers were still caught way off guard, as evidenced by reactions online:
There were plenty of those posts going around on social media this week. The FOMO of what had everyone floored is what convinced me to watch the doc in the first place, and boy, I was not disappointed.
I have to hand it to the “Unknown Number” team; they knew how to keep viewers on their toes. The only thing more surprising than Kendra Licari being the culprit was her agreeing to be interviewed for the doc, which, according to director Skye Borgman, was no easy feat.
“It was a long process with Kendra,” Borgman told Tudum, noting that the mom eventually agreed so she could answer questions surrounding the case.
“That was appealing to her,” the director added, “[to] sit down and tell her story from her perspective and that Lauryn [could] see her do that. She wanted to do it, I think, for her daughter.”
Lots of people had questions about why Kendra Licari targeted her own daughter, and with such vitriol, for so long. Some, like former Beal City Superintendent Bill Chilman in the doc, attributed her behavior to a cyber form of Munchausen syndrome, noting, “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 behavior.”
But even with the mom’s reflections at the end of the doc, some of which she said stemmed from personal trauma, we never really get a straight answer.
That aspect of “Unknown Number” may always be a mystery. What we do know is that everyone who was impacted by Kendra Licari’s catfishing scheme has tried to move on with their lives, including her, after being released from prison last August.
Still, viewers are sure to continue dissecting their horror and shock online as long as the doc keeps trending.
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