Inside Michelle Carter's Intense Friendship With Alice Felzmann

Content warning: This story contains details on a case involving death by suicide that might be triggering to some readers.

HBO's documentary I Love You, Now Die tells the real-life story of Conrad Roy III and Michelle Carter, teenage lovebirds whose relationship ended in tragedy.

Carter is currently serving time behind bars for the involuntary manslaughter of Conrad Roy III, whom she was texting a flurry of encouraging messages leading up to and even after his death by asphyxiation on July 12, 2014 in Fairhaven, Mass. 

The HBO documentary called into question Carter's relationship to someone other than Roy, namely Alice Felzmann, when explaining the events that led this young girl down such a dark spiral that ended in persuasive texts to her boyfriend to go through with his suicide plan.

So who is Alice Felzmann? Keep reading to find out.

Whether or not you think that Carter is responsible for the death of her boyfriend Roy, we can agree she was very disturbed, depressed, and lonely in the years leading up to the events of July 2014. 

She and Roy met back in the summer of 2012 in a vacation town with their families, but earlier that summer, she'd struck up a friendship with one Alice Felzmann while playing softball on a travel team. 

As Jesse Barron — who appears in the documentary and has also penned "The Girl From Plainville," the long-form Esquire piece on Carter's trial — sees it, the friendship between the young girls is crucial to getting inside Carter's head. 

She craved attention, that much is certain from the nearly 4,000 texts she sent high school classmate Sam Boardman, but she was also deeply insecure given what happened the last time she'd gotten close to someone and quickly lost them. 

From the way it's painted in both I Love You, Now Die and the Esquire story, it appears Carter and Felzmann got really close (to the point of becoming "inseparable") during their softball games away. When the team would go out to get food, the girls would do their own thing. 

When they got back from a softball game in Montreal, they had possibly the closest friendship of Carter's young adult years leading up to Roy's death. "Michelle stayed over at Alice's at least once a week," Barron writes of the blonde girl none of her classmates wanted to hang out with after school or on weekends.

Then one day, out of the blue, at least to Carter, Felzmann ghosted her. "This whole Alice situation is making me depressed," Carter texted Roy. In a text to Boardman, she wrote, "I don't have a best friend that wants to hang out with me when they're not doing anything. I mean Alice was my best friend but I guarantee that was all my fault that we aren't now too. And the worst part is she won't even talk to me now and it just makes me feel like absolute sh-t."

While it's impossible to know (Carter has denied any and all interviews with the media) what exactly happened between the then-15-year-old girls, it's clear that the loss of her friendship with Alice made Carter lose sleep at night.

"I'm obsessed with her like idk how to stop," she texted a classmate. "Every love song or whatever, it's her I think about." In another message to a friend, she wrote, "I thought it was a phase at first like I thought we were just really good friends. But we started talking like a relationship would, flirting and stuff."

"Like idk if I am bi," she continued, "I guess because I never had that type of relationship with another girl to really tell." 

When Barron managed to get Felzmann to agree to an interview for his story, the young girl brought her mother, Kelly, along. She had been the reason, at least in part, for the dissolution of the girls' friendship, and it's hard to tell whether she might have admitted to more of a relationship without Kelly present.

The girls were often texting through the night, spending a lot of time chatting on Facebook, and the mom eventually forbade her daughter from engaging with Carter. "You're going to cut all ties," she remembers telling her at the time, per Esquire. 

Then, when Carter sent her a handwritten love letter a year after Alice had ghosted her, Alice's mother never gave it to her daughter.

So all we know (and "know" is a tough word here, considering the levels of fantasy and delusion associated with this now-famous texting case) is that Carter claims she fell for Alice and that she was her first kiss, while Alice's mother — not Alice herself — claim this detail was made up, according to Barron.

I Love You, Now Die is now streaming on HBO.