Episode 57: Demolition Derby Demon

Lucas and Megan investigated the case of a potential demonic possession at a demolition derby. We speak with several witnesses, as well as the intended victim who survived the attack by a deranged driver.

Content Warning:  demonic forces, occult practices and summoning magic, mysticism, physical injury, death, fire, automobile wreckage, misogyny, extramarital affairs, black magic

Host: Chris Estes
Writer: Lucas Knight & Chris Estes
Senior Investigator: Lucas Knight
Special Investigator: Megan Meadows
Sound Design: Chris Estes
Producer: Megan Meadows

Transcript

Malevolent Maine

Episode 57: Demolition Derby Demon

Malevolent Maine is a horror podcast, and may contain material not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

INTRO: 

MEGAN: An update on Mark! A visit to an outdoor concert. And the culmination of our year-long investigation into the King Beyond the Desert. These are the final stories coming your way in Season 3.

Hey everybody, it’s Megan. We’re getting closer to the end, and you’re not going to want to miss a single episode. As always, follow us on social media, rate and review the show wherever you listen, and if you’re able, support us on Patreon. We’ve got deleted scenes, behind the scenes extra, and of course, our side stories. Cardinal Sins dives into the mystery of the cult known as the Hermetic Brotherhood of the Cardinal Court, and Witch’s Mark fills in some gaps with what Mark’s been up to since he disappeared after our encounter with the Five Covens. Plus tons of new stuff coming soon. Thanks again, and stay safe out there.

The roar of the engine blocks out everything else, a thunderous roar, like some angry beast. The horrible crash of shredding metal rises above and smoke fills the air. You cut the wheel to the left, feeling gravity throw you back against your seat as you brace for an impact you just narrowly avoid. Suddenly, across from you, like two eyes burning with a fiendish, fiery light blazes into your vision, as a massive black car hurtles towards you. Now the engine really is some demonic scream, and the car’s grille resembles the sneering face of a nightmare creature suddenly sprung to life.

This is Malevolent Maine.

TITLE SEQUENCE

A quick update before we begin today’s story. A few weeks back, Tom and I visited Rand’s Animal Kingdom, an abandoned animal preserve up in Greenville. For the full story, go back and listen to Episode 51, but here’s a quick summary. Tom and I may have opened a mysterious hatch in the ground that led down into a secret underground bunker. That possibly let out some sort of electromagnetic pulse that caused us to hallucinate visions of a monstrous form chasing us through the woods. When we left the area, we left the hatch open, too nervous to make a return trip. We’ve been keeping an eye on the area, looking for any signs that the hatch is causing some sort of negative impact.

Well this morning, we received an email from an undisclosed address. In fact, the address appeared to be blocked somehow or sent from someone with no actual email address. It seemingly makes no sense, and even some of our IT experts we work with couldn’t figure it out. 

The email was short. It began with an odd series of letters and numbers, looking a little like the “strong passwords” Google will sometimes recommend you use. Then there was the message itself: “It’s taken care of. Do not return.” Below that was another string of those meaningless letters and numbers. Attached was an image. 

It was a picture of the metal hatch door we left open. It was closed once again, and new chains and locks had been attached to it, making sure it wouldn’t be opened again.

We checked the metadata for the picture, and it was taken in the exact location Tom and I visited, just yesterday.

It appears someone with the knowledge and skill to hide their email identity, made a trip to Rand’s Animal Kingdom and closed the hatch. Now, we suppose this could be a listener, someone who heard our story and decided to see for themselves. 

But if that’s the case, why the secrecy? And what does the strange code before and after the message mean? It could be someone messing with us, but somehow we doubt it. There was something…menacing about the short message and image. A warning not to interfere again. We have the feeling that this was someone with intimate knowledge of just what exactly that hatch led to and what it could do.

For now, we’re going to follow the email’s advice and leave the whole thing alone. We’ll continue keeping an eye on the area, but we wanted to let you all know that once again, the hatch door is closed. Whatever that actually means, we’re still not sure.

On to today’s story…

Start your engines, MMers. Today’s story is taking us to the derby.

Since its creation in 1886, Americans have been obsessed with the automobile. Cars gave many Americans a sense of freedom, allowing them to travel wherever they pleased, whenever they wanted. More than that, they became status symbols, still used to this day. The type of car a person owns can define them, set them apart from others, or reveal their inner personality.

Countless songs have been written about cars, trucks, and motorcycles. Books, movies, tv shows, podcasts, all have bowed before the altar of the gas powered vehicle. Getting a first car is seen as a rite of passage into the world of adulthood, and most families own at least two cars.

So why the fascination with the automobile? For one thing, it allowed mobility. In a nation that was growing geographically, where family and friends spread to all corners of the nation. It meant new job opportunities, new living opportunities. 

But more than that, automobiles represent raw power. These fast,potent machines allow an individual to tap into power well beyond human capability. Drive 80 miles per hour, haul tons of cargo, even traverse difficult terrain, all with the turn of a key and the press of a pedal.

It’s no wonder that as soon as Americans fell in love with cards, they began finding ways to compete with them. From its humble beginnings used in bootlegging moonshine by outrunning the police, NASCAR has become one of the largest sporting events in the nation. But it wasn’t just in feats of speed that drivers competed.

Enter the demolition derby. Literal tons of steel ramming into each other and full speed until they can’t move and burst into flames. It’s hard to imagine a more American pastime than that. All across the country at local fairs and raceways, thousands of people line up to watch drivers attempt to smash and batter each other into a mass of crumpled steel and burnt rubber.

MEGAN: We recently heard from Cecilia Dyer, who as a teenager spent her free time fixing up beater cars and entering them in demolition derbies all over Maine. She said she hasn’t raced since 1997, but that the events of her final derby still haunts her. She recently found our show through a friend on social media and realized she might finally be able to make some sense out of what happened that night in Oxford Hills.

The demolition derby has its roots in post-WWII America. There are records of race promoters in California, including Don Basile, who created events where cars would race but were allowed to crash into and try to disable one another. This type of racing became extremely popular in England, where it was known as “Banger Racing”. But while these may be the early cousins to the demolition derby, they aren’t quite the real thing. An actual demolition derby doesn’t involve any racing, per se. The goal isn’t to get from Point A to Point B; it’s simply a physical slugfest between cars and station wagons. Drivers bash their opponents, ramming into them again and again, until only one car is left running. 

One of the earliest official derbies ever recorded was in Wisconsin in the 1950s, where a used car dealer named ‘Crazy Jim’ allowed drivers to smash used cars too broken down to sell into each other until a winner was crowned. By the 1960s, derbies became popular events at county fairs and race tracks all over the U.S. 

Only vehicles labeled as cars or station wagons are typically allowed. Trucks, SUVS, and other types are ineligible. Most competitions require the vehicles to be two wheel drive. All glass must be removed from the cars, including the headlights and windows. The gas tank has to be moved to be behind the driver to reduce fire danger. There must be some way for the officials to access the engine of the car through the hood, in case there is a fire that needs to be put out. All cars need to have large numbers on their sides and on the roof so they can be easily identified.

Not all cars are permitted, however. One car in particular is universally banned from nearly every single demolition derby: the Chrysler Imperial. The Imperial is built much like a truck, with a solid steel chassis. It is nearly indestructible, which was great when these things were everyday drivers out on the road getting into accidents, but it made for an unfair advantage at the derby.

MEGAN: Cecilia Dyer was a bit of a child prodigy when it came to demolition derbies. Her dad, Wade Dyer, was big into the hobby when she was growing up and she spent her tenth birthday carefully strapped into the passenger seat of her dad’s derby car as they crashed into opponent after opponent. By fifteen she had bought and fixed up her first derby car. By sixteen she had won her first championship. She was well known at all the state fairs for her skill and her eagerness to compete. But after a good run of solo derby attempts, some of which saw her competing against her own father, she retired from derbies at the age of 21 after a run in with another competitor named Craig Ellis. 

Craig Ellis has been described by people who know him as “overly competitive,” “abrasive,” and a slew of words we can’t say on our show. To say he wasn’t well liked on the Maine derby circuit was a bit of an understatement. To this day many of the people we spoke with had nothing but harsh words to say for the former driver. 

“He was a right bastard,” one old derby driver told us. “But Craig Ellis was a heckuva driver. He was all or nothing, he was. He’d either take the pot or come in dead last. He cut a lot of corners and made a lot of people mad just to win a couple of hundred bucks at a time, but the man could drive.”

Craig Ellis’s style has been described as “straight forward” and “battering ram.” He went for power over finesse. He hardly ever attempted to avoid being hit, and instead did everything in his power to simply drive through his opponents. When it came to the derby he was narrow minded - bash the opponents to pieces or lose trying.

That’s not to say Ellis couldn’t be clever. In fact, he was well known for doing anything he could to get a competitive advantage over his other drivers. One driver told us a story of how Ellis snuck onto his house the night before a derby and dumped a box of nails all over his driveway, hoping to pop a tire or two. Another man told the story of how Ellis had seduced another man’s wife the night before a derby in Bangor, then painted his “confession” on the hood of his car. 

According to Cecilia Dyer, Ellis hadn’t been able to compete in the Skowhegan derby in 1997 because he had tried to pass off a ‘69 Imperial, the aforementioned banned car, as a different model. He had modified the body panels in hopes no one would notice, but during the pre-derby inspection the officials caught it right away and disqualified him.

During breaks in the action, Cecilia said she could hear Ellis chirping at the officials, bad-mouthing the competition, and heckling her in particular quite vulgarly. 

Craig Ellis had always had a problem with Cecilia and her style of driving. He claimed it had nothing to do with her being a woman, but she told us she believes that was at least part of it. Mostly though, she thinks he just hated the way she drove. Unlike Ellis who was hell bent on causing as much head-on destruction as he could, Cecilia’s style was all about strategic hits and quick maneuvers. Cecilia liked to drive defensively at the start of the race, staying away from the main action, then quickly darting in for a well-placed strike on an unsuspecting opponent.

Throughout the entire Skowedhgan derby in 97, she could hear him yelling about how she was ruining the sport, how she was sandbagging or avoiding contact. 

MEGAN: Cecilia Dyer won that derby and when she got out of her car to claim her prize, she saw her father, Wade, confronting Ellis. She said her dad was right up in Craig Ellis’s face. They were both yelling and then started pushing and shoving each other. A few of the other drivers had to pull them apart, and Ellis was escorted off the fairgrounds. Cecilia said she was used to men like Ellis and didn’t think too much of it. She was just happy to have won.

The next major derby that year was in Oxford Hills. Cecilia said she needed a new car after Skowhegan and invested in a beat up blue Ford Escort. She worked on it day and night to get it ready for the competition. The Escort was small and quick, just the way she liked it, and after some work, the little car packed quite a punch, both under the hood and above it.

Cecilia wasn’t the only one preparing for the Oxford Hills derby; Craig Ellis had souped up an old Ford LTD station wagon as well. He had painted the whole thing matte black, and it sat there, like a dull black shadow, seemingly absorbing the light all around it. In fiery red numbers, Ellis had painted 911 on the sides. With a malicious sneer on his face he told anyone who would listen it was because he was, quote “definitely going to send someone to the hospital.” He let it be known he was hoping it would be that - and we’re paraphrasing her for discretion - that scaredy - “cat lady driver who couldn’t steer straight to save her life.”

Cecilia told us that her dad, an experienced derby driver himself, who passed away six years ago, tried to calm his daughter’s nerves. “Daddy told me not to mind that fool,” she wrote in an email to us. “He said to drive my way and not get tricked into doing what didn’t come natural to me.” Wade had retired a year or two back but had kept up with the community and was a well-respected driver. Many looked to him as a sort of elder statesman for the sport, and his advice was highly respected. 

Still, Cecilia couldn’t help but feel nervous. Her Escort was quick and agile, but Ellis’s wagon was a tank. She knew she wouldn’t be able to take many hits from that behemoth before breaking down, and she knew Ellis would be gunning for her. 

As the derby commenced, Ellis, as expected, wasted no time ramming and pushing folks around with his hefty station wagon. In the first few moments he had done considerable damage to other cars, but hadn’t been able to get to the blue Escort. Cecilia, for her part dipped in and out of the action, dodging attacks when she could, and positioning herself perfectly to knock several drivers out of the contest. During all of this, she did her best to keep as far from Ellis and his black monster as she could.

MEGAN: Cecilia told me that several times Ellis came close to smashing into her, but each time she managed to scoot out of the way and let another car take the hit. But she said she noticed something unsettling each time Ellis got too close. She said he was staring at her, eyes extra wide, and that he kept gnashing his teeth. She said she thought he was actually growling, but it was impossible to tell over the roar of all the engines. Most of all, however, she noticed that his face had grown a bright, angry red, and that she could see a huge vein throbbing on his forehead beneath the visor of his helmet. 

As the derby went on, more and more cars fell by the wayside, victims of Ellis’s crushing black beast and Cecilia’s precision strikes. Cecilia told us she noticed something else strange about Ellis’s car.

All of the automobile’s glass should have been removed before the derby. That includes all windows and windshields, but also things like headlights and the bulbs inside. But Cecilia claims that she noticed a dull orange glow coming from Craig Ellis’s headlights. She said it looked like those sodium street lights you used to see in parking lots before the advent of LEDs. This was odd for several reasons, the first of which there shouldn’t be any glass or light bulbs at all. Secondly, from the moment Ellis first smashed headlong into an opponent, those bulbs should have shattered. Finally, and this was the most disturbing to Cecilia, it seemed that as more drivers fell out of the competition, those orange lights grew brighter, and seemed to flicker, almost like firelight.

In the end, of course, it came down to the two rivals. The officials halted the race and had Cecilia and Ellis drive to either end of the track. The announcer took a moment to hype the crowd up, and announced the two finalists. As Cecilia looked across the arena to Craig Ellis, her stomach dropped. 

Craig Ellis was slumped in his seat, his head lolled to the side, but his hands were still firmly clamped to the steering wheel. She couldn’t tell if he was conscious or not and feared he might have had a heart attack. She was about to yell for the officials to stop the derby, when the flag dropped, and the black station wagon roared to life.

Ellis’s eyes opened, his head still bent at an uncomfortable level, and Cecilia swore she could see the same orange light of his headlights burning in his eyes. 

In a second the black wagon was bull rushing her, and Cecilia was forced to hit the gas and cut the wheel to avoid getting crushed head first. She dodged Ellis as best she could, but was unable to avoid a few hits. Each time, she said she saw Ellis’s head flop around as if it were broken, and she wondered again if the man was even conscious. 

She wasn’t able to avoid a head-on collision, and felt herself jolted by the force of the car. As Ellis backed up and prepared for another ram, she swore she saw the fires in the car’s headlights burn even brighter. She thought she saw an evil smile on Ellis’s otherwise expressionless face, and the man floored the accelerator.

She took a second hit, then a third. Her Escort was still running, however, and she did her best to outmaneuver the bigger car. She managed to score some hits of her own on the hulking station wagon, but not enough to disable to black car.

MEGAN: Cecilia told me that at one point, Ellis’s car was coming straight at her, intending to t-bone her and pin her to the barricade. She said as she hastily switched gears to get out of the way, she stared at the oncoming driver. His face was a shade of dark red she hadn’t seen before, and that center vein seemed to be trying to tear free of his head. With each bump, his head bounced and jerked as if it wasn’t attached to anything. Right before she accelerated out of the way, she said Ellis’s eyes which had been shockingly closed, sprang open and she swore she saw actual flames leap out of them.

Cecilia got out of the way just in time, and the black 911 car smashed into the barricade. She scooted around it, and as Ellis was attempting to back up, she smashed into the rear end, sending it back into the barricade.

That’s when the fire started. Something had sparked in the engine, and flames quickly engulfed the vehicle from hood to back bumper. Cecilia pulled back so the fire wouldn’t spread to her Escort.

Ellis quickly reversed and spun the car around so that he was facing her. Officials were getting ready to call the match, but before they could, Ellis revved the engine and heard straight toward Cecilia.

Not knowing what else to do, and desperate to end the derby before anyone got seriously hurt, Cecilia began to accelerate as well. “I remember thinking, let the best car win,” she told us. “I remember thinking that I had to be hallucinating. Maybe I had hit my head harder than I thought. There was no way this could really be happening. But I didn’t know what else to do.”

As the two cars barreled towards each other in a final, blazing collusion, Cecilia said she saw Ellis grin at her, and his teeth appeared to be razor sharp fangs. The vein on his head had seemingly split open and something thick and black, like used motor oil was running down his face between the two fiery points of his eyes. “It was like staring into the mouth of hell,” she said.

The two cars came together in a horrific crash of screeching metal and flaming debris. Cecilia said she knew right away that her car was done and that so was Ellis’s. She jumped out of her car right away and sprinted across the track, fearful of the growing flames.

As she looked back over her shoulder she saw Craig Ellis just sitting in his car as the fire spread. His head which had hung lifelessly throughout their entire showdown was upright and the fire in his eyes was still burning bright. In the firelight she couldn’t tell if it was blood that covered his face or something else, but she said she thought she saw something oozing from the split wound on his forehead, something that wasn’t a liquid, but wasn’t exactly solid either.

“It was like smoke,” she wrote. “Except it was solid. This might have just been my nerves of a concussion or whatever. But I swear, it poured off of him, like something clawing its way out through the split vein.”

MEGAN: It only took a few seconds for the officials to hurry to the car and put out the flames with fire extinguishers. But when they went to pull Craig Ellis from the wreckage of his station wagon, they were in for a shock. Ellis was dead.

The official cause of death was listed as heart failure. None of the black, oozing stuff Cecilia claimed to have seen was noted, nor was there any indication that his face had cracked open somehow. In fact, there were no outward signs of injury of any kind. It appeared that Ellis had suffered heart failure in the moments after their fiery cataclysmic crash.

But Cecilia isn’t sure she believes that. In the decades since her final derby, she’s often wondered about what she saw that night and whether any of it was real. “An unconscious man can’t drive a car, right?” she said. “And it’s not like a car can drive itself. At least not back then.”

So what did happen that night at the Oxford Hills demolition derby.

Cecilia has her own theories. And so do we.

Here’s Lucas to explain.

LUCAS: There’s a chance that Craig Ellis, his vehicle, or possibly both were possessed by a demonic force. We’ve heard of such things before, though not in the context of a demolition derby. But we know that Craig Ellis was a competitive man, a man unafraid of trying to pass off a banned car as something else to get an edge over his competitors. What’s to say he wouldn’t seek demonic help to ensure a derby win, especially if it meant paying back a rival that he detested?

Craig Ellis left behind no surviving family. He did have a woman who claimed to be his girlfriend, but they didn’t live together, and hadn’t seen one another in over a month at the time of his death. After the disastrous derby in 1997, the woman, named Linda Walsh in a newspaper report covering the crash, left town soon after. We have been unable to find her to ask if she has any knowledge that Ellis had been into demonic rituals.

The other complicating factor is that this case is almost thirty years old. Ellis’s home, a double wide trailer, has since been demolished and replaced by a modest Cape. He never had many friends to begin with, and those that knew him claim not to know anything about his pastimes other than the derby. In fact, many people didn’t even know what he did for work.

There is one acquaintance, who wished not to be named for this show. He claimed that he had seen Ellis a week or two before the Oxford Hills derby. The man, a retired derby driver himself, and now a part time mechanic preparing for retirement to Florida, said he ran into Ellis at a bar they both used to frequent. He told us he remembered it was midweek and the bar wasn’t that busy. He said Ellis was in a back corner with a book, sipping a beer from a can.

“This was a little weird to me,” the man said, “because I wasn’t aware Craig Ellis could even read.”

The man claimed he got his own drink, then went over to say hi to Ellis and wish him luck at the upcoming derby, a common courtesy most drivers afforded one another. “Not that Ellis ever wished the same on anybody else,” the man told us. 

The man saw that Ellis’s book was small, smaller than a paperback and was old. It had a black cover with some symbols drawn in red that he didn’t recognize. The man said Ellis stuffed the book into a back pocket when he approached the table. When the man asked Ellis what it was, he told us Ellis explained it was, quote “Just a little bit of reading to help get a leg up.”

Is it possible Craig Ellis was reading from a book on demonology? It certainly is. There are several well-known handbooks or grimoires for calling up demonic forces, as well as hundreds of lesser known, personal tomes penned by aspiring warlocks. But the fact that the book was small, just a little bigger than a wallet, is a pretty good clue. That, coupled with the cover - black leather with red symbols - seems to indicate the book may have been the Codex Infernum, a 13th Century spellbook and treatise on demons, penned by the Greek wandering scholar, Nikostratos of Thessaly.

LUCAS: Nikostratos of Thessaly was a known member of the Circle of Nyx, a secret society dedicated to the study of magic and exploring the darker side of the spirit world. He was said to have been inducted at an incredibly young age and was noted for his skill with summoning demons. Eventually he was driven from the Circle of Nyx for so-called heretical practices, but what those could possibly be is unknown. It’s said he retreated to the mountains near Thessaly, and there wrote his masterpiece, the Codex Infernum, a comprehensive theory detailing the summoning, binding, and banishment of demons. Nikostratos supposedly wrote Codex with ink mixed with his own blood. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1267. Some of his devoted acolytes took the Codex Infernum and kept it secret, passing it down from generation to generation, preserving the dark knowledge Nikostratos had accumulated.

It’s highly unlikely that Craig Ellis came into possession of the original Codex Infernum. No one has seen the original since 1666, when it was supposedly lost in the Great Fire of London. However, several copies are known to have survived. Ellis could have somehow gotten his hands on one of these copies or perhaps a more recent edition and foolishly attempted to use it to gain a competitive edge.

If Craig Ellis did summon a demon and attempt to use its power to help him win the derby, he did so at the cost of his own life. As we’ve seen countless times before, even a small mistake, as simple as a line drawn in the wrong place or a slight mispronunciation, can have a massive impact on the summoning. Ellis was likely a novice when it came to demonic summoning, and may have made just such a mistake. Instead of using the demon’s energy to move faster and hit harder, the demon consumed his life, after using him to cause wanton destruction.

It should be noted that the ‘97 Oxford Hills derby was an especially destructive one. Three drivers were taken to the nearby Stevens Memorial Hospital with injuries sustained in the derby. One driver suffered a broken leg from a smashed in door that had to be cut away to get the man out. Another broke both wrists after a head on collision. A third was knocked unconscious and spent three hours in a delirium before recovering with minor brain damage. All three drivers claim their injuries came off hits from Craig Ellis, though this can’t really be verified. However, it seems as if his promise to send someone to the hospital was fulfilled.

And speaking of the 911 painted on his car in fiery letters, Lucas has a theory on that as well.

LUCAS: What if it wasn’t 911 the emergency phone number but 9 colon 11, like a Bible verse. In the Book of Revelations, verse 9, chapter 11 reads, “And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon.” Abaddon literally means destruction in Hebrew. This verse is talking about a lord of hell, the angel of the bottomless pit and the king of locusts, second only to Satan himself. He is known to cause indiscriminate destruction and revel in the spread of carnage. A fitting demonic entity for a demolition derby.

If Craig Ellis summoned Abbadon either on purpose or unwittingly,   it’s likely the local ne’er-do-well was no match for the demon lord. It may have used Ellis or his black station wagon as a host for its own selfish purposes before retreating back to its infernal depths. Perhaps temporarily sated on all the rent metal and broken bones, the demon abandoned Ellis, or whatever was left of him. It’s difficult to say for sure.

MEGAN: Cecilia Dyer never competed in a demolition derby again. She said the thought of the infernal-eyed, snarling corpse behind the wheel of the hellfire station wagon was just too much. She couldn’t bring herself to get back behind the wheel of a derby car again. What if whatever dark force had empowered Ellis’s final ride was still out there, waiting for another driver to consume?

It is entirely possible that Cecilia embellished the story, perhaps even unwittingly. She admits she may have been suffering from an undiagnosed concussion. Others who attended the race vividly recall its fiery finish, but none of them remember seeing anything hellish or demonic. No one remembers the fiery glow of the headlights or an apparent dead man driving the LTD wagon. Then again, no one was as up close and personal as Cecelia was. This could have simply been an extremely violent derby that ended in the unfortunate death of one of the drivers.

But it’s just as possible the demonic spirit of destruction worked its will over the derby.

Either way, the next time you’re out enjoying a demolition derby, be on the lookout for the dangerous glow of fiery orange headlights. And if you do see something, be sure to report back to us.

Stay safe out there, Maine.

MALEVOLENT MORSEL:

MEGAN: I really liked Cecilia. I thought she was a total badass. Like a really cool aunt. She was covered in tattoos, black hair with these almost defiant strands of gray, done up in a sort of Victory roll. She looked like something out of a classic pinup biker picture. She sounds a little like Ava Gardner. She invited me out to her garage to do the interview. She’s a mechanic now, but she only works on vintage cars, luxury purchases for people with too much money looking to restore classic cars to impress their friends, mixed in with serious car collectors and gearheads like herself.

The garage was plastered with old car and oil signs, license plates, and posters from various races and derbies in the state. There’s a row of trophies on one wall, a mix of both her and her dad’s. 

The garage is remarkably clean for a repair shop. Under a canvas tarp she showed me a 1950s Jaguar XKSS she’s slowly restoring in her free time. She calls it in the same sentence, “her baby” and a “fucking pain in her crotch.” She talks like that, mixing in elevated vocabulary with the bluest garage talk I’ve ever heard, most of which I can’t even repeat. She laughs a lot, a deep throaty laugh, and she made me laugh a lot too. I feel like I could be friends with her, even if I’m not sure we have anything to talk about except her experience at the demolition derby.

Before we sit down for the interview she offers me a cup of coffee, which I accept. She splashes some Jack Daniels into her own cup then gives me an inquisitive look over the top of the bottle, which I decline.

(Okay, I really accepted, but don’t tell the guys.)

“It all started with that cock-sucking sonuvabitch, Craig Ellis,” she says, but then gives me a conspiratorial look. “But there was a lot more to it that night than just an asshole with a bruised ego…”

Malevolent Maine is Lucas Knight, Tom Wilson, and Chris Estes.

If you’d like to read more about our investigations check out our website at malevolentmaine.com

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Thank you for listening to Malevolent Maine. 

And as always, stay safe out there, Maine.