If you loved the Trainwreck documentary series on Netflix, you’re going to love this disturbing new movie that’s just landed on the streaming service.
Unknown Number – The High School Catfish tells the story of a teenage girl and her boyfriend who are relentlessly cyberbullied by an unknown phone number for months. When the investigation unfolds, the authorities uncover a shocking secret that upends everything anyone thought they knew about the case.
It’s got you hooked, right? It’s no surprise that the new Netflix documentary has already entered the top 10 most-watched movies of the streamer, and viewers are already dubbing it as one of the most shocking true stories of the year (alongside critics like Time Magazine).
If you don’t want the absolutely jaw-dropping twist revealed to you before you stream it, look away now, but it’s not often that I get a chance to play deep-dive detective at work, so I’m taking my chance to fully explain the case behind Unknown Number – The High School Catfish.
Netflix’s Unknown Number is incredibly disturbing, and I’m hard to scare off
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Spoilers for Unknown Number – The High School Catfish ahead.
Our story starts in late 2021 in Beal City, Michigan, where Lauryn Licari and her boyfriend Owen begin receiving aggressive text messages from an unknown source. The documentary shows us that this began with messages like “hi Lauryn, Owen is breaking up with you,” leading to more divisive messages including “he wants sex, bjs n making out, he don’t want ur sry a**”.
Owen alone was receiving as many as 30-50 messages a day. For Lauryn, these became more sexually explicit, even leading her to believe that she would be “better off if you were dead”. Local authorities got involved in January 2022 and called in the FBI for reinforcements a few months later in April.
And who was behind these messages, you might ask? Lauryn’s mother, Kendra. She was pretending to be another classmate who was infatuated with Owen, using an app called Verizon to disguise the numbers she was using to send the texts. FBI liaison Bradley Peter noticed that Kendra’s number came up multiple times while looking into the case, leading to her arrest and devices seized in December 2022.
You might now know the basic details, but I cannot stress how shocking this is to watch play out in a chronological sequence. Viewers will see the body-cam footage of Kendra being arrested, alongside her trying to argue, “realistically, a lot of us have probably broken the law at some point or another and not gotten caught. I’m sure people drove drunk, haven’t been caught.”
Why Kendra did what she did is open to interpretation, but a few solutions are suggested throughout Unknown Number – The High School Catfish. As the former Beal City superintendent Bill Chillman tells us: “She 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 behavior.”
Don’t hold you breath and binge immediately… I promise this new move is one that you’re never going to forget.