Part 3 of 4

Mary Hogue could see it immediately: Michael Severance had no idea what he was getting into.

It was late summer 2003. The then-22-year-old Air Force serviceman had been a racer, starting with downhill skiing and cross country at his high school in Lee, Maine.

But he appeared at Hogue’s racing garage in Abilene because he wanted to take his first try at West Texas dirt track racing. Michael wanted to start at the top, driving amateur modified racers.

Hogue thought he was crazy.

“He had no tools to work on a car. He had nothing,” Hogue, 37, said with a laugh. “He didn’t even have a racing suit. He borrowed his.”

Hogue’s husband, Danny Hogue, was equally skeptical, but by the end of that first meeting, the couple felt comfortable enough with Michael to trade their dirt track race car for Michael’s Raptor four-wheel race all-terrain vehicle.

It was a handshake deal.

“Usually it’s cash money, but he didn’t have it,” Mary Hogue said. “We surround ourselves with people who do deals on a handshake …

“Danny basically said, ‘I trust that this Raptor is what you say it is, and you trust me and this car for what it is,'” she recalled. “There was nothing in writing or stone.

“He had this natural aura about him,” Mary Hogue said of Michael during an interview at the racetrack. “You could trust him with whatever, and you knew he would trust you.”

Michael disappeared Jan. 15, and his body, riddled with poison and 41 stab wounds, was pulled on March 6 from a San Angelo pond. His wife, Wendi Mae Davidson, is charged with murder and two counts of tampering with evidence for allegedly dumping his body. Her trial is scheduled for next spring.

Perhaps more than anything else, Michael’s pursuit of racing illustrates his transformation from a shy, quiet Mainer, an honors student at Lee Academy, to a more confident, ebullient Texan.

Michael, his Abilene friends said, liked two-step country dancing and life at Abilene’s Dyess Air Force base, but his assimilation into a large group of about 50 Texas amateur racers in and around Abilene – and their warm embrace of him – showed how far he had come.

Maine was his home, but he found himself in Texas.

To the drivers, dirt-track racing, with its red Texas dust, speed, intense noise and frequent crashes, is like a dehydrating mix of sex and skydiving.

“It’s like trying to control something that is uncontrollable 99 percent of the time,” Mary Hogue said. “You don’t have any time to think about anything. Your adrenaline is going full-throttle the whole time, and before you know it, the race is over, and you’re like, ‘We’re done? And I’m alive?’ ”

The racing, according to International Motor Contest Association regulations, is arrayed in seven classes – Bombers, Junior Minis, Hobby Stocks, Mini-Modifieds, Istocks, Limited Late Models and Modifieds – through which racers typically work their way.

That’s why Michael’s leap into modified stocks in his $3,000 car is still spoken of with deep respect.

“It’ so expensive, and so intimidating,” Hogue said of driving modified racers.

Hogue’s best friend, Jeanie Campbell, put it another way.

“It would be like going into a huge business that you know nothing about,” Campbell said, “and becoming president of the company.

“But that was Mike,” Campbell added. “That’s just the level he liked to live his life at.”

“He was bit by the bug [of racing], and he would do anything he could,” Hogue said. “He went in there blindfolded. He didn’t care about what he had to do to get there. He had a vision, and no matter what was at the end of the tunnel, he was going to do it, one step at a time.”

Fearless respect

Yet like his time in the Air Force, Michael’s efforts behind the wheel were marked by an innate respect for others, modesty, diligence and humor, his friends said.

“He knew his place,” said racer Josh McGaha, 20, of Brownwood, who once sold the airman a racecar. “He’d never run over people on purpose. Like some of these guys are beginners, but they act like they’ve been racing for 50 years. He was never cocky like that.”

Severance was fearless, Danny Hogue said.

“He spun out and got into a few crashes, and he still loved it. He’d say, ‘That’s the most fun I ever had!'” Hogue said. “He knew he could do it. He just had to learn more about it.”

Michael’s crack-ups followed a typical pattern, Jonathan Campbell, a racer and husband of Jeanie, said.

Severance would jump out of his car and say, “Damn! Think those guys are mad at me?” and Campbell would answer, “Probably not, Mike. … But don’t go over there for a while,” Campbell recalled.

Michael attacked the sport and wrestled with its costs. One of his best friends, Derrick Fesmire, 25, of Abilene, remembered Michael’s “eating Ramen noodles for two weeks at a time” to save money for parts and repairs.

From watching Michael race ATVs, Fesmire said he believes that Michael eventually would have become a more aggressive modified car driver.

“When he raced ATVs, he would do the max. He would really push it. He had to be out in front,” Fesmire, also an airman at Dyess, said. “I think he didn’t race modifieds the same way because he didn’t want to wreck anybody driving a more expensive car. He knew he had more to learn.”

His thoughtfulness prevented him from being a better racer, said Dar Robison, 42, an Abilene woman who owns an MX track on which Severance raced ATVs from 2000 to 2003.Michael would rather lose a race than risk damaging somebody else’s car, Robison said.

Michael ingratiated himself into the large group of racers and family formed around the Hogues, the Campbells and the Fesmires in a way that his wife Wendi, a lifelong Texan, apparently never quite managed.

“I never even knew he was from out-of-state,” fellow racer McGaha said. “He sounded a little different, but he dressed and acted like he was from here.”

Michael, his friends suggested, was down-to-earth in a way his wife was not. He fit in quite naturally, and in his own way, yet Mary Hogue said it took awhile for her to figure him out.

His quiet, watchful manner was quite unlike the sunnier, more ebullient Texas style, and it eluded her until he joined a racers’ rafting trip on the Guadalupe River in New Braunfels, Texas, a few months after he first met the Hogues, she said.

About 50 people attended the annual adults-only, hell-raising party of beer and food – “Not like ‘Girls Gone Wild’, but it’s fun,” Hogue said – and had a great time acting out.

Except Michael.

“Every time you looked back you saw him smiling, watching everybody with his arms crossed, but he didn’t do anything. He just loved to kick back and watch,” she said.

Hogue wondered why Michael wouldn’t let himself go. Then she noticed that whenever anyone fell off the raft into the river, Michael would swim to them even if he didn’t know them.

“He was making sure everybody was OK,” she recalled.

That’s when Michael started to make sense to her. He showed he cared, even if he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – ever say so, she said.

“We were inseparable after that,” Hogue said.

“When he came out to the racecar shop, it was kind of like a circle. Everybody clicked, and he liked the clique,” Hogue said. “He liked the people, he liked the clique that he was going to surround himself with. Everybody brings a little piece of the puzzle. Everybody has something to give.

“Mike’s part in it was different – his persona, his way of thinking was different than anyone else. He brought something different that no one else brought into the group.”

Signs of Mike’s presence were still there when his father, Leslie Severance, visited the track with his son FrankSeverance, Michael’s younger brother, during their trip to Texas this past June.

More than 20 racecars carried Severance memorial bumper stickers or wore No. 4, the number of Michael’s car, as a tribute.

Les Severance said he had no idea how involved Texas dirt racing is. Anticipating a powerfully negative response, Michael shyly had told his father’s girlfriend of his racing plans before he mentioned them to his father.

“When he told me, I said, ‘Mike, I got to do the parental thing – no, no, no!’ ” Les recalled as he walked around the track with Hogue.

Les was more impressed, and maybe more fearful, when his son put him behind the wheel of his racecar and got him to fire it up when Les visited his son for Michael’s wedding in September 2004.

“It’s hard enough, driving one of those things around the track by yourself, never mind with seven or eight other guys out there,” Les recalled. “I don’t know how he did it.”

Michael’s parking spot for his racer was left empty for several months after his disappearance, merely because people hoped he would show up again, Robison said.

Of all of Michael’s racetrack friends, his death might have hit Fesmire hardest. Besides racing, the two worked together at Dyess, and Michael often acted like Fesmire’s older brother, encouraging him to try racing IMCA modifieds.

Fesmire almost saw Michael and Wendi the night of Jan. 15, the last time anyone saw the Maine man alive.

Michael called Fesmire and his wife, Julie, and asked them to come to San Angelo for a night of dancing, but the Fesmires declined. They couldn’t find a babysitter on short notice.

“To me, real deep in the back of my mind, I feel that if we went down there, we could have changed things,” Fesmire said.

“He always wanted me to get out there and race and I would never do it,” Fesmire added, his eyes brimming with tears. “Now, if I do get out there, I’ll win one race and I’ll quit. I’ll do it for Mike.”