Watch trailer for Netflix’s ‘Unknown Number: The High School Catfish’
“Unknown Number: The High School Catfish” has sparked internet chatter over the cyberstalking crime that changed the lives of many in Beal City.
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- Trending Netflix documentary “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish” is about a cyberstalking case in Beal City, Michigan.
- Two Beal City high schoolers received thousands of vulgar text messages from an unknown sender for months.
Spoiler alert: This story contains details — including the ending — from the documentary “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish” airing on Netflix.
“Unknown Number: The High School Catfish” has taken the No. 1 spot for streamed movies on Netflix, sparking internet chatter over the cyberstalking crime that changed the lives of many in the small mid-Michigan town of Beal City.
The documentary by Skye Borgman, which debuted on Netflix on Aug. 29, tells the tale of a high school couple who received thousands of personal and vulgar text messages from an unknown number for over a year before the FBI was able to link the messages to a sender, whose identity is revealed in the series’ shocking conclusion.
Beal City, in Isabella County, has a population of about 300 people, and its school district has about 700 students, who attend the same building from kindergarten through 12th grade.
What happened
In fall 2020, 13-year-old Lauryn Licari was in a relationship with her classmate, Owen McKenny.
In October 2020, Lauryn and Owen were added to a group text chat with an unknown telephone number that claimed Owen was going to break up with Lauryn and that the unknown sender will be at an upcoming Halloween party, hosted by the family of one of the about 30 other students in their class.
The messages stopped after the Halloween party, but 11 months later, they came back, about six messages a day that eventually ramped up to 40-50 messages a day for the next 15 months, with some calling Lauryn by her nickname “Lo,” swearing at her, calling her obscenities and using terms like “ugly,” “anorexic” and more. The messages also said explicitly detailed sexual acts the sender claimed to have done or wanted to do with McKenny. Multiple messages urged Lauryn to kill herself.
About a year after the first message was sent and a month into the second round of texts, Lauryn and Owen’s parents asked Beal City Public Schools for help in finding answers and bringing consequences for the person sending the messages.
Isabella County Sheriff Mike Main got involved. His department focused the investigation on students in the school, as the messages tried to implicate friends of the couple, such as Khloe Wilson, through details like the number of points she scored in a basketball game and changing the area code of her text messages to that of the Florida town where she was vacationing.
Who sent the texts?
Warning: Spoilers ahead
After about year of investigation by the school, all while the messages continued to be sent, Main brought the case to the FBI, where many of the unknown numbers messaging the pair were traced back to Kendra Licari, Lauryn’s mother.
Body camera footage of Kendra Licari being confronted with a search warrant and videos taken in court, included in the documentary, show Kendra Licari saying she didn’t send the initial round of texts. But she did admit to sending later ones, saying she began to spiral and send them obsessively.
Kendra Licari was charged with two counts of stalking a minor, one for Lauryn and one for Owen. She was sentenced to 19 months in jail and released in August 2024.
What happened to everyone?
Lauryn and Owen broke up before the investigation was over, as the messages caused fights, and the couple thought it might be easier to give the sender the breakup she seemed to want, though it did not. At the time the documentary was filmed, the couple was still not speaking.
At the end of the documentary, Lauryn said she had not seen her mom in a year and a half, though she communicated with her by phone and email.
According to an interview with the documentary’s director Skye Borgman in Netflix’s Tudum, Kendra Licari’s participation in the documentary came after much of the film had already been completed. Borgman said she agreed to an interview to tell the story from her perspective in a way that would be visible to her daughter.
What is the internet saying?
A lot, as always.
Since the release of the documentary, thousands have posted their thoughts on X, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook about their shock or suspicion of the plot twist, the sentencing and how the case affected the high schoolers and their families.