A woman who catfished her own daughter, sending her death threats and requests she kill herself, was able to secretly send 40-50 texts a day without being caught for nearly two years.
The shocking incident was the focus of a brand-new Netflix true crime documentary and saw the woman, Kendra Licari, exposed after 22 months in which she tortured her daughter Lauryn.
Alongside this she also sent regular messages to Lauryn’s boyfriend at the time, Owen, leading many to feel she had a secret hidden motive that the Netflix doc barely explored.
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The mystery rumbled on for months with no conclusive leads, with the school and the police struggling to figure out who could possibly be behind it before it was revealed to be her mother.
In Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, it's revealed that Kendra was exposed by an FBI agent who matched the messages being sent to Lauryn and Owen to an IP address linked to Kendra’s phone.
Until this point, she was able to evade capture by using an app on her phone that managed to mask her phone number.
When Lauryn and Owen tried to block the anonymous numbers, the app would be able to randomise the phone number they were being sent from.
The school tried to figure out who was sending the messages by viewing security tapes from the moment they received the texts and it came up with nothing since it wasn’t a student.
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Despite this though, it does raise questions of how Kendra was able to send so many messages non-stop all day to Lauryn and Owen whilst posing as an anonymous student who wanted to break up their relationship.
The estimates vary across the documentary, with Lauryn saying she received about six or seven messages a day. Owen’s mother, Jill, however, estimated that it was closer to 40-50 a day he was receiving.
A reveal from the documentary partially explains this – she had been lying to her husband about her job.
In the bodycam footage of the moment Kendra’s lies fell apart, it is revealed that she had been lying for a year about her previous job. She told him she’d left her job when really, she’d been fired.
In the course of her guilty plea for two counts of stalking minors however, it was revealed that she had also fabricated a new job she supposedly had started and had been unemployed for the previous year.
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Her new job essentially became the horrific messages she was sending her daughter, with her reportedly having spent as much as eight hours a day on it.
These included messages shaming her daughter’s body, telling her to kill herself, and saying she would ‘bang’ Owen if she didn’t commit suicide.
She was sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison in 2023 and was released on parole in August 2024.
Unknown Number: The High School Catfish is available to watch on Netflix.
Topics: Documentaries, Mental Health, Netflix, Parenting, TV, TV and Film, True Crime
Michael Slavin