You may have seen many catfishing tales in shows and documentaries, from MTV’s Catfish to Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare. But you have never seen anything like the latest Netflix true-crime documentary sensation, Unknown Number: The High School Catfish. The story revolves around a young high school couple, a series of downright vile text messages that span years, and a tangled web of lies that culminates in a reveal you’ll never see coming.
The True Story Behind ‘Unknown Number: The High School Catfish’
Lauryn and Owen are two kids growing up in the small town of Beal City, Michigan. They start as friends, then begin dating, and eventually become the “golden couple” at their high school. They’re the typical “prom king and prom queen” high school couple you see in the movies. Except these kids were just 13, 14, and 15 years old throughout the duration of the incidents.
One day, Lauryn begins to receive a series of horrible messages from an unknown number calling her ugly, telling her Owen wants to break up with her, and that she’s worthless. Owen eventually receives similar messages urging him to help them “take down” Lauryn. As the months progress, the messages get worse. It seems the mysterious person is stalking them, referencing things they wore that day in school, how they performed in their latest game, and even details about their upcoming plans.
The texts come in fast and furious and eventually escalate to devastatingly cruel, vile, and even sexually graphic messages. Both sets of parents are at their wits’ end. When the police come up blank after interrogating several suspects, from an old friend of Owen’s who might still have a crush on him to Owen’s cousin, they send the information to the FBI in hopes that they can help.
A trace of an IP address leads to a warrant for the cell phone company, and the officer can cross-reference the number with Owen and his mom’s contact lists. Only one number comes up as a match, and who it belongs to will shock you to your core.
The Aftermath Is Crazier Than the Reveal
The number, it appears, belongs to Lauryn’s own mother, Kendra. It seems downright ridiculous to think she could have sent such awful messages to her own child. Nonetheless, the police receive a warrant for her laptop and phone(s) and pay her a visit. It doesn’t take long for her to confess to the crime.
What’s most wild about the big reveal in this true-crime documentary is not even that it was Lauryn’s own mother sending her messages calling her ugly and worthless and telling her to kill herself. It was her justification for it, which wasn’t much of a justification at all. The family was having financial troubles. She was laid off from two jobs and lied to her husband about it, saying she quit one, and he presumably thought she was still working the other. Her own cousin questions whether Kendra had even been employed with the company in the first place.
She referenced her own childhood trauma, including being raped at 17 and wanting to protect her daughter. She felt upset that her daughter was growing up and didn’t want her to have the same experience. How sending such messages to not only Lauryn but to the seemingly nice, polite young man she was dating would accomplish this is unclear.
The story becomes even creepier when it’s suggested that Kendra might have been infatuated with Owen. He looks back and finds her behavior towards him odd. She would go out of her way for him, even cut his steak into pieces. Even after he and Lauryn broke up, Kendra would still attend Owen’s games and would reportedly text him one-on-one on occasion to see how he was doing.
During her hearing, Kendra admitted to knowing she had a mental illness, though what mental illness is not specified. It’s suggested in the documentary that she may suffer from a form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Those with Munchausen’s either fake or intentionally cause physical or psychological symptoms in themselves for attention or sympathy. Munchausen by proxy, most famously exemplified in the Gypsy Blanchard case, occurs when a person, typically a parent, intentionally causes harm to their own child.
Thus, the inference is that Kendra’s acts were a form of cyber-based Munchausen’s by proxy, notes Beal City superintendent Bill Chillman in the documentary. Kendra caused Lauryn to feel such psychological pain from the words in these messages and being constantly taunted, so she could be the one there for Lauryn to help comfort her. The documentary’s director, Skye Borgman, tells Time she feels that Kendra sent those messages to “essentially force Lauryn closer to her.”
So Many Questions Remain
Lauryn indicates in Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, one of the best new true-crime documentaries on Netflix, that while she hasn’t seen her mother in a year and a half since she was released from prison, they kept in touch while she was incarcerated. She still loves her mother deeply and wants to have a relationship with her, something most viewers watching simply can’t comprehend. Even in the body cam footage, when the police first reveal the discovery to Kendra, Lauryn can be seen hugging her mother and holding her hand while also clearly in shock.
Still, it’s tough to reconcile the lewd nature of the messages, many of which referenced inappropriate sex acts for teenagers who are so young. Furthermore, Kendra’s explanations don’t seem to express remorse for what she has done, nor do they acknowledge that it’s far more disturbing than some other, less damaging crime. “Realistically,” she says in a warped sense of justification, “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.”
She doesn’t appear to comprehend that breaking the law isn’t the issue. It’s purposely, intentionally, heinously targeting her own daughter and an innocent young man in a sick and twisted game of catfish that plays on their vulnerabilities, drives them to have suicidal thoughts, as Owen admits in one of his text message replies, and strips away at their self-esteem. Not to mention the other innocent young women she hurt by having fingers unjustly pointed at them as possible suspects.
For now, Lauryn is 18 years old and thus a legal adult. Borgman observed, during her 2024 visit to Lauryn, a year after their initial interview, that she was “more measured” about how much she would let her mother into her life. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see Kendra yet, but admitted she still loved her mother.
It’s easy to judge, but it’s also a situation that no one can truly understand without being in it. Nonetheless, the entire story, from start to finish, takes you on a wild ride with unexpected twists and turns, evoking a range of emotions, from sadness to anger to outright disgust.
The most important message coming out of the documentary, according to Borgman, when speaking to Netflix Tudum, is to “listen to your kids, understand the threats that are out there, and give them the ability to make good decisions.” But it’s also clear from this incredibly unbelievable story that people are capable of doing things most of us can’t possibly ever comprehend. Stream Unknown Number: The High School Catfish on Netflix.
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