A teenage girl and her boyfriend had their lives turned upside down when they became victims of a horrific cyberbullying attack, but things only got worse when they discovered the perpetrator.
Lauryn Licari and her former boyfriend, Owen McKenny, were 13-year-old high school students in Beal City, Michigan, when they became the targets of vitriolic harassment from an anonymous number in October 2020.
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 Lauryn’s mother, Kendra Licari, 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 44-year-old 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.
Lauryn Licari and her former boyfriend, Owen McKenny (pictured together), became victims to a months-long cyberbullying attack at the hands of Lauryn’s mother
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.
Pictured: The moment that police came into the McKenny family home to confront Kendra about the messages (pictured Kendra and Lauryn)
Kendra would sometimes spend eight hours a day sending messages to her daughter and her former partner
Kendra admitted to sending the hateful messages (pictured: Shawn, Kendra, and Lauryn Mckenny)
‘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 Bill Chillman.
Owen McKenny (pictured) and his former girlfriend started receiving messages before Halloween in 2020
Owen’s mother, Jill McKenny (pictured), said her son’s relationship with Lauryn was like a film at first
Lauryn said that the messages changed the way she thought about herself and impacted her mental health
‘They were vulgar and nasty enough to make a 53 year old 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.
Superintendent Bill Chillman (pictured) branded the messages that the students received as ‘vulgar’
Owen said that Kendra’s behaviour towards him during his relationship with Lauryn wasn’t normal
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.
Kendra denied sending the first message, but said she continued them. She had also told her family she was working, but in reality was let go from both of her jobs and spending her time sending the messages.
Speaking in the documentary, 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.’
Lauryn’s father Shawn Licari (pictured) was clueless to his wife’s actions – and was devastated to discover the truth
The mother pleaded guilty to two counts of assaulting a minor and was sentenced to 19 months to five years in prison
She continued, ‘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.’
‘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, who added that her actions may have stemmed from her childhood trauma, said she would spend anywhere between an hour to eight hours a day texting the children. ‘I let it consume me,’ she said.
Referencing the messages where she referred to her daughter’s body type, Kendra 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.’
Thinking back to the moment she discovered the truth, Lauryn said, ‘I think the shocked feeling turned into sadness, which turned into mad, which turned into crazy. I don’t even know how to describe the feeling.’
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.’
Kendra pleaded guilty to two counts of assaulting a minor and was sentenced to 19 months to five years in prison and was released in August last year.
She’s not currently allowed to see her daughter but hopes to have a relationship with her in the future.
Unknown Number: The High School Catfish is available to watch on Netflix.
