'High School Catfish' Recap: Where Are Lauryn Licari And Her Parents Now?

The premise of the new Netflix documentary film, Unknown Number: High School Catfish, is not that uncommon, as it deals with a case of intense cyberbullying and catfishing through text messages, targeted at a couple of teenagers in high school. However, the investigation into the matter that followed, and the ultimate findings of it, are truly mind-blowing, to say the least, immediately making the film stand out from the list of usual documentaries. Directed by Skye Borgman, whose previous works like Abducted in Plain Sight and Girl in the Picture were equally thought-provoking, High School Catfish provides an intriguing look into the bizarre incident and especially the perpetrator.

Who are Lauryn and Owen?

Set in Beal City, Michigan, High School Catfish begins with an introduction to Lauryn Licari, a student of the Beal City High School, which happens to be the only high school in the extremely small town. As young girls growing up in a small town with just two bars, Lauryn and her friends naturally had a habit of using social media on their phones from a very young age. Her classmate and former boyfriend, Owen McKenny, also admits to doing the same, putting up photos and videos of himself since his early teenage years. Lauryn was mostly a shy girl who enjoyed playing sports and was part of the high school basketball and baseball teams. Owen was much more extroverted from the very beginning, and he too played basketball, baseball, and football for the high school team. 

It was through their personal interests in sports that Lauryn and Owen became good friends in seventh grade, when they were 12 years old, and started participating in activities together, like going out trick-or-treating with each other. Eventually, Owen asked Lauryn out on a date after gathering a lot of courage, and she said yes, which started their sweet and mostly innocent romantic relationship. Both the kids were quite open about the matter with their respective parents, sharing the details of the new development in their young lives. Lauren told both her parents, Shawn and Kendra, about how she had been talking to a boy and how he had asked her out, and except for the immediate but casual concern that most fathers have about their daughters dating, neither Shawn nor Kendra saw anything wrong with the situation. Similarly, when Owen told his parents, Dave and Jill, about how he had asked out a cute girl in his class, they supported him too.

Very soon, the Licari and McKenny families became friends as well, as they would attend sports events to support the kids and also hang out together during other school events. Kendra and Jill particularly became very good friends, and they frequently visited each other’s houses, and Lauryn and Owen really enjoyed their lives together. Their relationship soon became public knowledge at the high school, and they were also seen as the perfect couple, who would never break up, as they seemed to be on the same page in every context. While there were clearly some students who did not like the attention that the couple got at school, Lauryn and Owen had a lot of close friends as well, who would always hang out around them.

Everything seemed to be normal and perfect for the young lovers until one day in October 2020, when the two of them realized that they had been added to a group chat on iMessage with just one more participant, a stranger whose number was not saved on either of their phones. Very soon, this stranger started texting the couple, with the messages mostly directed at Lauryn, in which the young girl was abused and shamed for no apparent reason. The stranger wanted to break up the couple and kept stating that Owen was not happy and satisfied in the relationship and how he would be much happier and more enthusiastic with them instead. Initially, the two of them believed that it must have been some kid from their school who was trying to tease them or bully them into breaking up, and they did not care too much about the situation. Since the incident took place a few days before the Halloween party, they felt that the two things might have been related, and they were relieved when the messages stopped after Halloween. Lauryn and Owen felt that the cyberbullying was over, but they were shocked when the messages once again started cropping up about a year later, and this time, there was no end to them.

How did the school authorities react to the situation?

When there was no sign of the abuse stopping after a few days, Lauryn and Owen told their parents what had happened, which led to them conducting thorough checks of their kids’ phones, but nothing could be found. The sender was using apps to mask their phone number, and there was no way to find anything more about the number. The kids naturally tried blocking the number, but the sender would get back at them through a different number, once again creating a group and sending abusive and threatening messages. When they tried calling the numbers, nobody would pick up, but the abuser would almost immediately text back, hurling more insults at Lauryn. The entire abuse was directed at Lauryn, and the vile messages contained extremely hurtful words towards her, and crucially, the abuser also started calling Lauryn by her nickname, Lo, which made it evident that someone close to her must have been doing all this.

The families initially felt that someone at school, who might have once been close friends with Lauryn, might have turned vengeful against her and it was all their doing. Therefore, they took the matter to the school authorities, who immediately promised to conduct an investigation. Bill Chillman, the superintendent of the school, admits in the Netflix documentary that the matter was nothing like the usual cases of cyberbullying that he was sadly so used to dealing with in modern times. The sheer number of texts that were being sent, ranging from 30 to 40 or even 50 on some days, and the terribly hateful contents of the messages made the case stand out. There would also be threatening texts with regard to any activity or incident that very recently took place in Lauryn’s life on that specific day, suggesting that the perpetrator was stalking the girl as well.

Beal City High School Principal, Dan Boyer, started looking into the matter along with Bill Chillman, and they asked Lauryn to text them as soon as she would receive the threatening texts while at school. The idea was to scan the entire school building through CCTV cameras and check if any particular student was typing messages around the time that Lauryn received the texts. However, doing so turned out to be an impossible task, as there was simply no way to check what students were up to while on their phones. At one point, the school authorities, and even a few of Lauryn’s friends, suspected that she might have been sending the messages to herself in order to get the attention of everyone around her, but this was simply a very insensitive theory made against the victim.

Although the school authorities could not ultimately do anything significant, the decisions of Bill Chillman and Dan Boyer were quite commendable in certain situations, although the concerned parents did not feel so at the time. Worried about the impact that the messages were having on their children, the parents requested the authorities to ban every student from bringing their phones to school, which was turned down. Chillman talks about how he feels that the smartphone is an important and integral part of education in today’s world, and so he rightly rejected the idea. Next, when the enraged parents wanted to personally check the phones of every student to find the real perpetrator, he did not let them do so, as it would have been a terrible breach of privacy for the other students and their families.

Was Khloe Wilson sending the text messages?

Very soon, a girl named Khloe Wilson became the subject of suspicion for the parents, the school authorities, and Sheriff Mike Main, who had been brought into the matter by the school. Khloe Wilson was a classmate of the two teenagers, and she was known to have had a liking for Owen since before he got together with Lauryn. Incidentally, the two girls did not like each other because of their differences in opinions and also evidently because of a feeling of jealousy over Owen. Nonetheless, Khloe still stayed friends with the boy and had also invited him to the Halloween party at her house, right before which the messages had first appeared. There was clearly some bad blood between the two girls, and they had even had a public spat some time earlier, but there was even more reason to suspect her.

Because of the constant threats and demeaning abuses that she was being subjected to, Lauryn was losing interest in her studies and her sports activities as well. After one basketball match, in which she performed very poorly, Lauryn received a text calling out her inability to play, and in this message, the sender also boasted about how they had put in a brilliant performance on the court just a day earlier, scoring 13 points alone. As soon as Lauryn notified the authorities about the text, they checked the records to find the girl who had scored 13 points in a game, and they were led to Khloe Wilson, who was also on the high school basketball team. Although Khloe and her parents kept stating that the girl was just being framed by the real perpetrator, as she had done nothing wrong at all, the authorities kept pushing the theory against her until no concrete proof could actually be found against her.

Who was the real perpetrator catfishing the kids?

It was finally when the sheriff’s office decided to contact the FBI’s cybersecurity representatives in April of 2022 that the first major breakthrough in the case was made. Bradley Peter, the FBI liaison looking into the case, started checking the phone numbers used to send the messages and realized that a mobile app called Pinger had been used on one occasion. Pinger is a mobile application used to mask or disguise an original phone number so that it appears as something completely different to the person being called or texted. Peter filed a search warrant with Pinger, and the company gave him two IP addresses from where the calls had been made, with the cell towers belonging to Verizon, and he then managed to get hold of all the Verizon phone numbers in the area with the two IP addresses. 

The FBI officer contacted the Licari and McKenny families, asking for a list of all the phone numbers of everyone they knew, in order to match with the list secured from Verizon. It was at this moment that the shocking reality of the situation was found, as Peter found a number common in both the lists, and it belonged to someone completely unexpected. As it turned out, the real perpetrator catfishing the kids was Kendra Licari, Lauryn’s mother herself. 

What was the perpetrator’s motive?

The real reason behind Kendra’s strange online tirade against her own daughter, which included body-shaming her and even telling her to take her own life, is the most mysterious part of the case, as no certain answer has been found. Kendra confessed to the crimes as soon as she was confronted by the FBI, and she claimed that she had originally started texting the kids to indirectly figure out whether they had any particular classmates or friends-turned-enemies in their minds as the possible perpetrators. Kendra apparently felt that the teenagers were not being honest with her or the other parents and had therefore started pretending to be the bully, only so that she could find some leads regarding the matter. But this claim obviously does not sound genuine at all, and neither the police nor the other parents believed any of it. 

Instead, most experts feel that Kendra Licari actually suffers from a variation of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which a parent intentionally hurts their child only so that the child craves for their attention, help, and love. While in most cases, the parent hurts their child physically, Kendra did everything she could to hurt and break her daughter verbally and by hiding her real identity, and then sought pleasure from the fact that Lauryn would come running to her for help and break down in front of her to be comforted by her. Kendra actually appears throughout Netflix’s Unknown Number: High School Catfish, and when asked by the producers about her actions, she admits her mistakes but claims to not know why exactly she had done the terrible things to her daughter.

Another theory, proposed by Owen and his parents, Dave and Jill McKenny, is that Kendra had started to develop some sexual and maybe even emotional feelings for the young boy, because of which she started seeing her own daughter as a rival in love. Although Kendra getting together with Owen was never going to be possible, she seemingly sought some pleasure by writing about extremely vile and degrading situations in her text messages. After all, Kendra’s romantic relationship with her husband, Shawn, had been waning for some time, and so she probably sought perverse pleasure elsewhere, according to the McKennys. 

In fact, Kendra turned out to be a serial liar and manipulator as well, as she had completely lied to her family about resigning from her job and joining a new job as an IT specialist at a college. In reality, Kendra had been fired from her old workplace, and she had been completely unemployed from then on. The timing of this personally difficult phase in her life did coincide with her starting to send the text messages, meaning that being fired must have had an impact on her extremely toxic acts. But her background in IT helped her use all the techniques to keep her identity concealed and abuse the kids. In the documentary, Kendra also claims that she had been affected by certain incidents from her own youth, like when she had been sexually assaulted as a teenager, but they do not necessarily justify what she ended up doing to her own daughter.

Who had started sending the hurtful text messages?

In her confession, Kendra had claimed that she was not the one to have started sending the text messages to Lauryn but had only pretended to be the original sender after a few months. Even in the documentary, and to this very day, she claims that someone else had started sending the hurtful text messages. However, no proof of anyone else being involved has ever been found, and the police as well as the psychiatric experts believe that Kendra herself had started the whole fiasco by pretending to be a hater from the very beginning. Therefore, her claims did not stand in court either, and she was held responsible for all the crimes and was charged with two counts of stalking a minor. In December of 2022, the court sentenced Kendra Licari to at least 19 months in prison. 

Where are Lauryn Licari and her parents now?

The catfishing crimes committed by Kendra Licari caused significant harm to numerous people, both directly and indirectly. Along with the terrible emotional pain that Lauryn experienced, her relationship and even friendship with Owen was completely ruined. The teenagers do not even talk anymore at present and simply avoid one another at school. When Owen had started seeing another girl some time after his breakup with Lauryn, she and her family were sent harassing and threatening texts by Kendra as well. Khloe Wilson, who really had nothing to do with the situation, and had been framed by Kendra, had been made to go through the struggles of being treated as the lead suspect in a police investigation, which is bound to have long-term effects on the girl’s mind.

In Unknown Number: High School Catfish’s ending, it is Lauryn herself who surprisingly comes off as a way stronger and understanding human than most adults. Despite the horrible things that her mother had done to her, Lauryn states that she wants to forgive Kendra and stay in touch with her again, which she did while the woman was behind bars. However, the terrible actions and all the lying had made Shawn divorce Kendra, and at present, he is raising Lauryn by himself. Kendra was released from prison in August of 2024, but currently she is not allowed to meet Lauryn. 

Although both the mother and the daughter want to reunite, they are unable to do so as of now either because of legal rules or due to personal boundaries set by Shawn, who cannot be blamed for doing so. After all, Kendra could have easily led Lauryn, Owen, or the other kids who got involved in the whole fiasco to do something as drastic as take their own lives. At present, Kendra lives somewhere in Michigan, while Lauryn Licari, now 18, continues to live with her father, Shawn, in their house at Beal City. 

...