Max Devore’s Offers to Buy Mattie’s Separation from the Family

Max Devore’s Offers to Buy Mattie’s Separation from the Family were a sequence of payments intended to remove Mattie from Lance and their future child, and then to keep her away from Kyra. The offers grew from $100,000 to a proposed $2 million plus scheduled birthday payments; their scale made clear that the custody conflict began before Kyra’s birth, as Max tried to turn family bonds into terms of a transaction.

Background and First Offers

In August 1994, after Lance told Max that he and Mattie planned to marry in mid-September, Max telephoned Mattie with an offer of $100,000. She kept the proposal to herself. A week later, the amount rose to $200,000. Both offers came directly from Max, and both were made when Lance was not present.

The requested exchange was not simply a payment for Mattie to leave the marriage. Max wanted her to disappear without leaving a forwarding address, ending her place in Lance’s life and preventing her from remaining part of the family. Mattie eventually told Lance about the second offer. He responded with anger, called his father, and insisted that the wedding would go ahead regardless of Max’s wishes. He also warned Max that if he wanted a relationship with his grandchild, he would have to behave.

The Attempt to Buy Kyra

About ten days before the wedding, Dickie Osgood visited Mattie and directed her to call a number in Delaware. Mattie later described what followed as an attempt to buy the child: Max’s offer now concerned Kyra as well as her mother. The approach moved the conflict beyond an effort to disrupt a marriage. It sought to separate a mother from her daughter before the child was even born.

The proposal was $2 million, deposited in a bank of Mattie’s choice so long as the bank was west of the Mississippi. In return, Mattie would give birth, leave Kyra with Lance, and stay away from both Lance and the child until at least April 20, 2016, when Kyra would turn twenty-one. The date made the proposed separation exceptionally long and specific: it was designed to last through Kyra’s childhood and into adulthood.

Escalation and Secrecy

The $2 million was only an initial payment. Max also promised an additional $1 million on each of Kyra’s fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and twentieth birthdays. In all, the stated schedule offered Mattie as much as $6 million in exchange for relinquishing her place in her daughter’s life and remaining apart from the family for years.

The terms arrived against the mundane pressures of Mattie’s circumstances: the kitchen linoleum bubbled, the showerhead kept falling into the tub, and the trailer leaned to the east. Mattie’s wry comparison between those repairs and the fortune she might have received registers the real material temptation without suggesting that she accepted it. The offer’s sum was vast; the domestic details show what that sum was meant to outweigh.

Mattie said that Osgood did not know the details, leaving Max’s role concealed from him and allowing Max to keep his own hands clean in town. The contrast between the private telephone offers and the use of an intermediary underscores the arrangement’s deliberate secrecy. The payments were not a public family settlement but an attempt to secure a private disappearance.

Consequences and Significance

Mattie did not take the money. She told Lance about the $200,000 offer, and the later account of the Delaware proposal likewise presents her as the person who rejected the arrangement rather than leaving Kyra behind. Max’s escalating bids therefore failed to remove Mattie from the family; instead, they reveal the depth of his determination to control who could remain close to his granddaughter.

The episode foreshadows the later custody struggle by establishing its underlying method: Max treats separation as something money can purchase, first from Lance and then from Kyra. The sum rises as the desired exclusion becomes more complete, from Mattie’s departure to a twenty-one-year ban on contact. The offers turn kinship into a calculated bargain, while Mattie and Lance’s refusal asserts that marriage, parenthood, and a child’s family ties are not simply transferable for cash.