Death on Delivery

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Chris Santella was feeding his infant daughter last Tuesday evening in the living room of his town house in Rochester, New York, when he heard the boom. "It was like someone slammed a door hard enough so that it shook the house," he explained. At first he thought it was his water heater blowing up. When no gushers of water followed, he waited until the child was asleep before looking out his door and catching sight of the blasted-out window in a town house 25 ft. away, the one rented by a woman named Pamela Lazore-Lanza. A bomb had gone off, killing Lazore-Lanza and a male friend. The bomb was one of four such devices that exploded almost simultaneously in different parts of western New York, killing five people and hanging a necklace of terror along 250 miles of the New York-Canada border.

The shirtbox-size bombs, delivered by mail or private courier, were packaged in brown cardboard and wrapped with tape. Several bore the return address of an iron-and-metal company in Pennsylvania. In each was a fishing-tackle box. When the latch was opened, it connected an electrical circuit and set off several pounds of dynamite surrounded by shrapnel. One bomb killed Eleanor Fowler, 56, in West Valley, near Buffalo. Another was opened by her husband Robert, 38, at his job in an armored-car garage in nearby Cheektowaga; it killed him and a co-worker. A third blew up Lazore-Lanza and her friend; she was Eleanor Fowler's daughter from an earlier marriage. And on the St. Regis Indian Reservation near the state's northern tip, an exploding package lacerated the legs of Lazore-Lanza's uncle, William Lazore. Identical parcels were sent to the Fowlers' daughter Lucille and her boyfriend but were detonated safely by authorities. All four explosions occurred within 90 minutes. It was as if someone was tracing the Fowler family tree -- in fire and blood.

At first some New Yorkers feared terrorism or a random killer. But by Wednesday evening, when police arrested Michael Stevens, 53, and Earl Figley, 56, the grudge began to seem very specific. Stevens' girlfriend is a woman named Brenda Lazore Chevere. The injured William Lazore is her uncle; the dead included her mother, her stepfather and her sister -- all apparently victims of a man they seem to have ostracized.

Chevere met Stevens and moved in with him soon after he got out of jail in 1989. He had served 20 months for overselling ads in store coupon books under the alias David Creditford -- "a con man who thought he was smarter than anyone else," a defense attorney recalled to New York Newsday. Stevens reputedly suffered from emotional instability -- at his 1987 trial he launched into a speech about Jimmy Cagney. More seriously, in 1992 local merchants Susan Katz and John Spinelli filed a police complaint when, they say, after nine months of harassment that included cruising their block and stealing their garbage, Stevens threatened to burn their business down.

Stevens and Chevere, 31, have a two-year-old son. Recently, however, Chevere seems to have soured on Stevens, for which he apparently blamed her family. Local newspapers said last week that his relations with them, especially her mother, had nose-dived. He was reportedly resentful of being excluded from Thanksgiving and Christmas festivities.

Figley, the older suspect, had boarded at Stevens' house, drunk with him at a bar called McGhan's, and was regarded locally as a harmless layabout under his younger friend's sway. Last June, Stevens sent Figley on a deadly errand ! to Mount Vernon, Kentucky, police say. There, under the name Leslie V. Milbury, Figley bought 55 lbs. of Power Prime dynamite. (Government officials later noted pointedly that explosives can be sold over the counter as easily as guns could before the Brady Bill.) Back in New York, the two used around 48 sticks' worth to craft last week's bombs, according to the federal complaint charging both men with transportation of explosives across state lines with intent to kill or maim, an offense punishable by death.

Had Stevens been planning the murders for half a year? Or were the fatal packages originally intended for some other purpose? One person who would doubtless add many questions of her own was, understandably, quiet. Reached by reporters at the house she shared with Stevens, Brenda Chevere excused herself from talking. "I've had a day," she said. "I've lost most of my family."

With reporting by Barbara Burke/New York