Unknown Number: The High School Catfish detail raises one major Kendra Licari question

Kendra Licari claims her actions were initially designed to protect her daughter, but one detail in Netflix’s Unknown Number: The High School Catfish appears to suggest there was a different motive at play. Warning: some may find this content distressing. 

The new documentary examines a true crime case that began in October 2020 in Beal City, Michigan, when 13-year-old Lauryn Licari and her then-boyfriend Owen McKenney were targeted by an unknown cyberstalker. 

Following a year-long gap, the messages returned – and they grew even more threatening. Thousands of texts show the stalker urging Lauryn to take her own life, while others were extremely sexually graphic. 

Eventually, the FBI were able to track down the culprit: Lauryn’s very own mother, Kendra Licari. Her motives remain unclear, but viewers think this one detail may provide at least part of the answer. 

Was Kendra Licari obsessed with Owen McKenney?

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Kendra claimed to have wanted to protect her daughter at first, only to get caught up in the chaos. However, this wouldn’t explain why she began harassing the family of Owen’s new girlfriend, which begs the question: was she secretly inappropriately attracted to Owen?

As is explored in the Netflix documentary, the messages started by attacking Lauryn and Owen’s relationship. An example of one of many says, “Owen loves me, and I will always be the girl he loves. He will be with me while your lonely, ugly ass is alone.”

The distress caused by the cyberbullying campaign led to Lauryn and Owen breaking up, with Kendra later implying that she was partly driven by fears of her daughter growing up, claiming she was sexually assaulted at Lauryn’s age. 

But not only does this not explain or excuse why a mother would urge her own daughter to commit suicide, it also doesn’t make sense that Kendra targeted Owen’s new girlfriend’s family. 

As Owen explains in Unknown Number, 19 months after the messages had started, he began dating a girl from Pinconning. “We were close, it was a serious thing,” he says. “I slowly started to feel happy again. Like, ‘Maybe everything will be okay.’”

Then, one day, she messaged Owen saying her mom had received a threatening message from an anonymous sender, “telling the girl from Pinconning to back off me ‘cause I’m theirs.”

The texts also continued to Owen, with one reading, “Owen, need your help making this b*tch jealous, miserable.”

Owen goes on to say in the documentary, “The texter went out of their way to find her mom’s phone number that lives in Pinconning. I just felt like I couldn’t do anything anymore… I felt like I couldn’t date anyone ‘cause I was putting them in danger.”

Fearful that his new girlfriend would experience the same situation as Lauryn, the couple decided to end their relationship. 

Viewers call Unknown Number: The High School Catfish “horrifying” 

Netflix

Although we don’t know if an obsession with Owen is the real reason Kendra did this, multiple viewers believe this to at least partly be the case. 

Taking to Reddit, one wrote, “What Unknown Number: The Highschool Catfish totally downplayed… Why did Kendra go after Owen’s new girlfriend, a full year after he and Lauryn broke up?

“That isolated single detail proves this had absolutely nothing to do with protecting her daughter and everything to do with her own predatory obsession with Owen. Owen’s mom tried to point it out, but they barely gave her a voice.

“It feels like the real story was ‘Predatory Mom Coach’ but decided ‘Highschool Catfish Story’ was way more marketable. It’s like they are deliberately downplaying the darkest part of this story and perpetuating Kendra’s misdirection/manipulation.”

Another agreed, “This was one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever watched. She was absolutely in love with Owen, and she told Lauryn to off herself, and then she’s sitting there crying saying she did it because she loved her daughter?”

Netflix

Others brought up the theory that Kendra could have acted due to a digital form of Munchausen’s by proxy syndrome – a rare mental health condition in which a caregiver deliberately fabricates illness in someone under their care to gain attention, sympathy, or a sense of control. 

“I think the most plausible scenario is a mix of mental disorders,” wrote one Redditor. “The theory raised by the school principal(?) was the ‘cyber Munchausen’s’. It makes a lot of sense. 

“She wanted Owen and she wanted to break the relationship. She was unemployed and Lauryn getting broken made her needed. The whole thing retroactively fed itself into this monstrosity.”

Both Owen and his mother Jill McKenny say in the new documentary that they believe Kendra was inappropriately attracted to him. “I think that there was some level of relationship that she wanted to have with Owen that obviously is not acceptable at her age,” Jill says. 

“If you look at how she treated him and how she glorified him, and she would go out of her way to do anything and everything for him, or just to be noticed by him – she would randomly just text him and try to keep a connection with him. 

“She came to all his sporting events, even after him and Lauryn broke up. This is disgusting.”

Owen adds, “It felt like she was attracted to me. She was super friendly and super, like, ‘Here, I’ll get you this, I’ll go do this for you.’ It wasn’t like it was my girlfriend’s mom.”

Kendra Licari’s Netflix interview sparks backlash 

Netflix

Regardless of whether this is true or not, Kendra sent countless explicit and sexually graphic messages to two minors. Since she was only convicted of stalking charges, many feel the punishment – 19 months in prison – didn’t match up to her crimes. 

“You know what wasn’t cool about this documentary was the bit where they talk about whether Kendra had an obsession with Owen – they matched it with RECENT photos of Owen, who is clearly a muscular and attractive young man now,” wrote one on Reddit. 

“But they SHOULD have matched it with photos of Owen when he was CHILD, because that’s when this whole thing occurred, when he was a scrawny little boy! If they’d done that then maybe they could have also floated the idea that she’s a clinical pedophile.

“Are we dealing here with double standards? Like if an older woman is attracted to a 13 year old boy we humanize her, as the documentary did, allowing her to talk about her trauma. 

Netflix

“But if Kendra had been a man, do you think the documentary would have treated her the same? HELL. NO. A man in the same situation would be thoroughly demonized. And rightly so. And so should Kendra.”

Others weren’t happy with the way Kendra seemingly suggests that she was just unlucky that she got caught, saying, “A lot of us have probably broke the law at some point or another and not got caught… I’m sure people drove drunk.”

One viewer said, “She’s an absolute monster and needs to be locked up. My jaw was on the floor when she was saying how everyone has broken the law at some point, but she just happened to be one of the unlucky ones to be caught.”

“I was yelling at the screen when she gave the drunk driving analogy. ‘And you’d be right here with me but for a different reason’. Drunk driving obviously isn’t cool and unacceptable especially in the world of Uber,” wrote another. 

“However, the person wasn’t telling their daughter to kill themself and making obscene comments about what Owen was doing to her. 

“Her trying to justify and rationalize it by saying ‘oh people commit crimes all the time and don’t get caught, you could be here too, but for different reasons’ shows that she has absolutely zero remorse.”

Unknown Number: The High School Catfish is streaming on Netflix now. For more true crime news, read about if the Jussie Smollett case was a hoax, Amanda Knox’s ordeal in prison, and the first poster for Monster: The Ed Gein Story.