A mother who catfished her daughter anonymously for over a year has revealed her motive for sending vitriolic harassment to the teenager and her boyfriend.
Kendra Licari from Michigan was exposed as the person behind an unknown number that plagued Lauryn Licari and her boyfriend Owen McKenny, who were both 13 at the time, with ‘hundreds of thousands’ of abusive and aggressive messages.
After it emerged that Kendra was responsible for stalking Lauryn and sending the awful messages, she was arrested and sentenced to 19 months to five years in prison after she pled guilty to two counts of assaulting a minor.
Speaking in Netflix‘s new documentary, Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, Kendra revealed some of the reasons that led to her behaviour.
The 44-year-old insisted that she did not send the first messages Lauryn had received from an unknown number that claimed Owen was going to break up with her – but admitted that she continued them.
Kendra said, ‘The messages stopped for a little bit and then they picked back up. In my mind, I’m like, ‘How long do we let this go on? What do I do as a parent?”
‘Honestly, the best way would have been to stop it by shutting her cell phone down, right? But then I was like, ‘Well, why should she have to do that?’ You know? ‘Why should I have to get her a new cell phone because of someone else’s actions?’
‘I really wanted to get to the bottom of who it was,’ she claimed. ‘And that’s when I started sending the text messages to Lauryn and Owen.’
Kendra continued to explain that she was messaging the teenagers ‘in hopes that maybe they would send back, asking ‘Is this somebody?’ or ‘Is this so-and-so?’ to just kind of give me something’.
She claimed that she also hoped the teenagers would discuss the messages amongst their other friends and, as a result, ‘something might come up that could help pinpoint where they were originating from’.
‘I started in the thoughts of needing some answers, and then I just kept going, it was a spiral, kind of a snowball effect, I don’t think I knew how to stop. I was somebody different in those moments. I was in an awful place mentally. It was like I had a mask on or something, I didn’t even know who I was.’
Kendra had lost both her jobs during the period she had been sending Lauryn and Owen the messages, but told her family she was still working. It was only when she was caught by police that she admitted she had been let go.
She said she would spend anywhere between an hour to eight hours a day texting the children. ‘I let it consume me,’ she said.
‘I think it was more of an escape. It took me kind of out of real life, in a sense, even though it was real life. So when I was doing that and I wasn’t myself, it removed me from my everyday life. Just kept going and going.’
Kendra also addressed the messages where she referred to her daughter’s body type and said, ‘Lauryn knows she’s skinny, she knows she’s petite, she knows she’s thin, so I might have kind of picked up on some of her insecurities.
‘But honestly, the messages weren’t really targeted at her insecurities,’ she said. The director asked if she was actually sending the messages to herself, to which Kendra replied: ‘That is very well possibly [sic] because I was way too thin. I was not eating. So you could put me in that anorexic category.’
Asked if she was afraid Lauryn would hurt herself, because some of the messages Kendra had sent told the young girl to ‘kill herself’, the former IT worker said: ‘So, I can say I was not scared of her hurting herself.
‘I know some people may question that or diminish that or whatever. But I know Lauryn and I know the conversations that her and I have. But if I didn’t know her as well as I did, it might be different.’
Superintendent Bill Chillman told the documentary that he believed the whole incident was a ‘cyber Munchausen’s case’.
He explained: ‘[Kendra] 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’s behaviour.’
Recalling the moment she was exposed as the perpetrator of the abusive messages, Kendra said: ‘It was a very emotional day in our house.
‘A day of confusion, unknown answers, shock, a day of not even knowing how we move forward to the next day, so it was a hard day, but at the same time, it was an end.’
She added: ‘Every single one of us makes mistakes, not a single one of us has lived a perfect life, and realistically a lot of us have probably broken the law at some point or another and not gotten caught.’
Kendra is not currently allowed to see her daughter but hopes to have a relationship with her in the future.
Lauryn and Owen’s lives were turned upside down when they became victims of Kendra’s cyberbullying campaign – despite their relationship starting off like any other high school romance.
The pair first met in seventh grade, when Lauryn was 12. Thanks to their shared interests in sports, among other things, they hit it off.
Their families supported the relationship, and Kendra became close friends with Owen’s mother, Jill McKenny. ‘They were like a high school couple from a movie,’ Jill said.
But just months into their relationship, the plot became something of a horror show when the students started to receive messages claiming that Owen was going to break up with his girlfriend and that he was enjoying an intimate relationship with an anonymous texter.
‘Hi Lauryn, Owen is breaking up with you,’ the text began, continuing, ‘He no longer likes you and hasn’t liked you for a while.
‘It’s obvious he wants me. He laughs, smiles, and touches my hair.’ The text added, ‘We are both down to f***. You are a sweet girl but I know I can give him what he wants, sorry not sorry.’
It marked the start of a harrowing two years for the children and their families, but after months of searching for the sender, matters only worsened for Lauryn when the FBI discovered her mother was behind the attacks.
Kendra spent months stalking and bullying her daughter, telling her to ‘jump off a bridge’, and the messages only worsened as time went on.
In October 2020, Owen was invited to an annual Halloween party held by his friend and fellow Beal City student Khloe Wilson.
Owen wanted Lauryn to attend as his plus one, but she declined because, as Owen put it in Netflix’s new documentary, Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, ‘She wasn’t a fan of the girls in our grade, she just wanted it to be me and her and no one else.’
It was then that Lauryn received the first text message, which included a line explaining that the texter was going to be at the Halloween party, and that they are ‘down to f***’.
Recalling the moment she received the text, which was from an unknown number, Lauryn said, ‘I was just really confused of who this could be’.
After the Halloween party, the texts stopped, and circumstances appeared to improve for Lauryn, but 11 months later, she received the following message from a different random number.
‘How’s the happy couple? Preparing for the end of a golden relationship? We hear about how you are the forever couple. Owen loves me, and I will always be the girl he loves. He will be with me while your lonely, ugly a** is alone.’
Discussing the messages, Lauryn said, ‘It seemed like the text messages were trying to make me and Owen break up. I knew it wasn’t somebody I knew because I would’ve had their phone number saved in my phone.’
Lauryn tried to call the number to figure out the person’s identity, but her attempts failed. She couldn’t block the number either because the sender was using a random number generator.
‘I was getting at least six text messages a day,’ Lauryn said, which included the following, ‘Trash b****, don’t wear leggings ain’t no one want to see your anorexic flat a**.’
‘I would question what I’d wear to school,’ Lauryn said of the message’s impact, adding, ‘It definitely affected how I thought about myself.’
Despite Lauryn and Owen being 13, the messages often included topics of a sexual nature.
Lauryn and Owen’s friends and family banded together to try to figure out who was responsible for the messages, and due to the details included in the texts, they thought it must be someone in their circle.
Her parents reassured her that everything was fine, while Owen’s parents took his phone away every night and read the messages, which sometimes totaled 50 per day.
One year after Lauryn and Owen received the first message, the four parents went into the school in the hopes that they might find the perpetrator.
Principal Dan Boyer recalled, ‘When they showed me some of the text messages, I was astounded.’
At the same time, the police became involved in the case, including Superintendent Chillman.
‘They were vulgar and nasty enough to make a 53-yearold man blush,’ Chillman said, adding, ‘The evidence was extraordinary.’
The messages became the hot topic of the school, with Boyer and Chillman pulling students out of class and installing cameras in an attempt to get to the bottom of the problem, but after 13 months, they still couldn’t locate the source.
Around the same time, the messages started to strain Lauryn and Owen’s relationship, causing him to call off their two-year romance. The pair now no longer talk to one another.
He hoped that the decision would give the texter what they wanted and that they would stop the messages, but after the breakup, the messages worsened.
Lauryn received messages such as, ‘He thinks you’re ugly’, ‘He thinks you’re trash’, ‘We won’, and ‘You’re worthless.’
The texter also told Lauryn to kill herself, ‘Finish yourself or we will #bang’, among other vile messages regarding physical harm.
‘When I first read that, I was totally in shock, it made me feel bad, I was in a bad mental state,’ Lauryn said.
After 15 months since the first message, the state police got involved, including Sheriff Mike Main.
By the Spring of 2022, Owen’s parents were sleepless while their son was receiving messages throughout the night.
At the same time, Lauryn’s family was breaking down while also grappling with financial issues.
In April, Sheriff Main sought the help of the FBI in putting an end to the case, and presented the pages of messages to a liaison, which finally led the months-long search to Lauryn’s mother, who has a background in IT.
FBI liaison Peter Bradley tracked down the IP addresses and linked it to Kendra’s devices. ‘I really didn’t know what to say,’ Bradley said.
22 months after Lauryn and Owen received the messages, police secured a search warrant and questioned Kendra, who admitted to sending the messages.
The admission caused shockwaves in Lauryn’s family, including for her father, who had no idea about his wife’s actions, as well as Owen’s parents, who became close friends with Kendra.
Owen said, ‘I was just speechless, I didn’t know how to handle it. My head was spinning. How could a mum do such a thing? It’s crazy that someone so close could do something like that to me, but also to her own daughter.’
Owen’s mother added, ‘I think she became obsessed with Owen, which is hard being a mum and that she’s a grown woman but I think that there’s some kind of relationship that she wanted to have with Owen that obviously is not acceptable at her age.’
‘She would randomly just text him and try to keep a connection with him, she came to all of his sporting events even after him and Lauryn broke up. This is disgusting.’
Owen agreed, saying, ‘It felt like she was attracted to me. She was super friendly.’ He added, ‘It wasn’t like it was my girlfriend’s mum, it felt like it was something more. She would do things for me, she would cut my own steak for me, it was too weird.’
Despite the findings, Lauryn, who is now in college studying criminology, still longs to have a relationship with her mother.
She said, ‘Not having a relationship with my mum, I just don’t feel like myself. I really need her in my life.’