THE RUNDOWN:
- Kendra Licari was arrested for cyberbullying her daughter, Lauryn Licari, in 2022.
- The stay-at-home mother of two had sent tens of thousands of messages to 13-year-old Lauryn and her boyfriend, Owen McKenny, over a period of almost two years.
- A new Netflix series, Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, unpacks the disturbing true crime.
Cyberbullying has been a problem since mobile phones entered high schools. But, a new Netflix true crime documentary, Unknown Number: The Highschool Catfish, asks why (on earth) someone would cyberbully their own child, as it unpacks the story of Lauryn Licari and her mother, Kendra Licari. It’s a true crime case that’s the most disturbing we’ve seen since the story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.
In October 2020, 13-year-old Lauryn Licari started receiving threatening text messages from an unknown phone number. Many of them focused on her relationship with boyfriend Owen McKenny. The author of the texts threatened and insulted her, claiming her boyfriend was cheating with the sender. “Hi Lauryn, Owen is breaking up with you.” Others included, “He no longer likes you and hasn’t liked you for a while,” f*** off u nasty skank wh*re and “It’s obvious he wants me.” Almost two years and tens of thousands of text messages later, Lauryn, her family and community would be rocked by the revelation that Lauryn’s mother sent the sexually explicit and violent messages. Kendra Licari, then 42, was arrested in December 2022 following an investigation by the FBI that had initially pinned other children at Lauryn’s Mt Pleasant school, as reported by ABC at the time. She was charged with multiple counts of stalking a minor and using a computer to commit a crime.
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During the close to two years, the orchestrated campaign of harassment took place, with Lauryn and her boyfriend receiving up to 50 messages a day. The texts threatened Lauryn, encouraged her to die by suicide, and made sexually explicit advances toward her eighth-grade boyfriend. One read he was “DTF,” another said, “He will be with me while your lonely ugly a** is alone.”
“Even when we realised that it wasn’t a kid, we weren’t expecting that it would be a parent,” William Chilman, the superintendent of Beal City Public Schools, told “Good Morning America.” Over two years, Kendra sent her daughter tens of thousands of hate-filled texts. She pleaded guilty, and in April 2023, she was sentenced to a minimum of 19 months in prison for two counts of stalking a minor. At her sentencing, Judge Mark Duthie was scathing in his assessment of Mrs Licari. As reported by The Morning Sun, Duthie said the case had shown him the “worst in human nature.” “I can’t imagine any parent saying such horrible things to her own daughter,” he said.
The cyberbullying investigation tore apart Lauryn’s Mt Pleasant, Michigan, high school, with another student initially accused. For many, the motives remain unfathomable. Here’s what happened to Kendra since.
Where Is Kendra Licari Now?
Kendra was sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison and a minimum of 19 months. She was released on parole on August 9, 2024, and will remain under supervision until February 2026, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections. At the time, Licari told the court that she would take back her actions if she could and that she was “ashamed, remorseful and embarrassed.”
In an interview for Unknown Number, she said she was “very disappointed with herself.” Following her guilty plea, Kendra was forced to admit she had been lying about having a job. She had told her husband that she quit her job in IT at a university, but it turns out that she was fired. Although she still resides in Michigan, it is unclear whether she is currently employed. It is also not known if she is still with her husband, Shawn Licari.
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Where Is Lauryn Licari Now?
When her mother was first sentenced, Lauryn said she loved her and wanted her back in her life. But when filmmakers returned a year later, following Kendra’s release, Lauryn seemed less sure. Director Borgman said Lauryn wanted to “approach the relationship with more caution.”
“She’s done a lot of pretty critical thinking, especially between that time and now … These years are such critical years for young people.” Borgman believes that while all the families affected have struggled, “she’s got the most complicated feelings to deal with. Everybody else can hate Kendra. I don’t think Lauryn can, right? It’s your mom. I mean, how do you navigate that? It’s really uncharted waters.”
Lauryn maintains a close relationship with her father, Shawn. Borgman described their bond as “really loving [and] really respectful.” The two are shown taking long nature walks together. When filming concluded, Lauryn was 18 and focused on finishing school. She had broken up with Owen and was no longer in contact with him, although his family took part in the documentary.
Are Owen And Lauryn Licari Still Together?
In Unknown Number, Owen shares that he eventually broke up with Lauryn, in hopes that the texting would stop. “I Facetimed Lauryn and I told her it had got too much and that maybe if we give them what they want, they would stop, and maybe one day we can try again. She was heartbroken.”
“He was my first boyfriend,” says Lauryn. “We had been together for over two years, and we just stopped talking to each other.” The pressure had gotten to the young couple and Lauryn had starated to wonder if there was truth to the messages. “She would accuse me of things that aren’t true because she was listening to the text messages. The one thing the texter wanted was for me and Lauryn to break up,” said Owen. Unfortunately for the two teens, their split did nothing to appease their harasser.
“I felt like all they wanted us to do was to break us up, and then when we did, the messages got worse,” recalls Lauryn. Text messages started detailing Owen’s new relationship, leading police to conclude the perpetrator was stalking the 14-year-old boy.
Does Lauryn Talk To Her Mother, Kendra Licari?
Lauryn and Kendra stayed in touch during Kendra’s prison sentence. In early interviews, Lauryn said she missed her mother and was keen to see her. But when she was interviewed a year later, after Kendra’s release, she seemed less certain. Now, their communication is limited and cautious.
“She didn’t hate her mother at all, but she was a little bit more measured in communications with her and a little bit more measured about how much she was willing to let Kendra into her life,” said Borgman. When the documentary finished filming, Lauryn and Kendra still hadn’t seen each other in person. “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 gets the last word in the doc: “I love her more than anything.”
Why Did Kendra Licari Do It?
The biggest question of Unknown Number is why anyone would do this to their child. Kendra, ultimately, seems unable to explain. At first she tried to frame her campaign as “everyone makes mistakes.” “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.”
How many people have sent tens of thousands of vitriolic messages to their underage child and their boyfriend is unknown.
In the documentary, Owen and his mother question whether Kendra was secretly attracted to him. He says she often checked in on him one-on-one, gave him special attention, cut his steak into bite-sized pieces, and attended his sporting events even after he broke up with Lauryn.
Former Beal City superintendent Bill Chilman argued that Kendra suffered from a cyber version of Munchausen by Proxy. “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 behaviour.”
With Munchausen by Proxy, a carer treats their child or partner as if they are sick in order to control them and gain sympathy. Kendra told the documentary makers that she was sexually assaulted when she was 17 and that her cyberbullying campaign was a twisted attempt to keep her daughter safe. “As my daughter was hitting those teenage years, I got scared,” she said. “I was afraid of letting her grow up, [want]ed to protect her and keep her safe.”
Borgman said this was less about protecting Lauryn from her boyfriend or any specific man and more about reinforcing closeness by keeping Lauryn scared and dependent. “I don’t think what Kendra is saying is that she was afraid Owen was going to rape Lauryn. Her fear was having her little girl grow up and go out into this big, bad world. She did these things to keep Lauryn closer, to have Lauryn come to her for help. By sending these text messages, she was essentially forcing Lauryn closer to her.”
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In the doc, Kendra was asked whether the texts calling her daughter anorexic reflected her own insecurities and whether she was really just texting herself. “Possibly,” Kendra replied, “because I was way too thin. I was not eating. So you could put me in that anorexic category.” Lauryn knows she’s petite, thin, so I might have kind of picked up on some of her insecurities – her appearance, her hair, her looks. But, honestly, the messages weren’t really targeted at her insecurities.” “I think it was an escape. It took me out of real life, in a sense,” she said.
Of her comments encouraging Lauryn to kill herself, she said simply, “I was not scared of her hurting herself.”
“I do not have an answer for you. I asked her that in the documentary, you hear the question. And she doesn’t have a good answer,” Borgman said. “Maybe the escalation to telling Lauryn to kill herself is the last attempt to get her as close as she possibly can. But it just seems so incredibly extreme. I mean, she says she never thought Lauren would do it, but I just don’t know any parent who would ever even think of doing something like that.”
“I don’t know that we’re ever going to understand that fully. I think it’s going to take a lot of work on Kendra’s part to figure that out, some real big self-reflection.”
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