Little Audrey: the life and death of a 'victim soul'

A milestone in supernatural claims has been reached: Audrey Santo--the brain-damaged girl in Worcester, Massachusetts, who, supposedly, exhibited stigmata, prompted effigies to drip oil and communion wafers to bleed, and miraculously sparked healings of the sick--died on April 14. She was twenty-three.

Known as "Little Audrey," she had been in a comalike state since August 9, 1987, when, at the age of three, she suffered a near-drowning. Controversy began a year after the accident, when her mother, Linda, spent $8,000 to take her to the shrine at Medjugorje, Yugoslavia, in hopes of a miracle. Instead, Audrey suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. Although she survived, the air ambulance that was needed to rush her home cost $25,000--a sum her grandmother had to mortgage her home to pay. Linda Santo's response to the near-fatal incident was to blame it on the proximity of a Yugoslavian abortion clinic (Harrison 1998; Sherr 1998).

Soon, Audrey was being promoted as a "victim soul." However, Catholic theologians, observing that that term was not an official one within the Church, questioned whether Audrey demonstrated the capacity--at the age of three or later--to make a free choice to suffer on behalf of others.

After Audrey was exhibited at a stadium with some 10,000 in attendance, and a window was added to her bedroom so that pilgrims could file by and pray for her to intercede with God on their behalf, the local bishop ordered that such practices be discontinued. Also curbed was the practice of offering oil-soaked cotton swabs as healing talismans. These restrictions may have diminished revenues, but the Santo family's situation was perhaps less financially desperate than many imagined, since Audrey received round-the-clock nursing care from the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind (Weingarten 1998).

I began to follow the Audrey Santo case as "miracle" claims about her proliferated. When an investigating commission appointed by the Worcester bishop issued a preliminary report on January 21, 1999, I appeared that evening on The NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw to offer a brief skeptical view of the case. For a later ABC 20/20 segment, a producer called and discussed with me the phenomenon of weeping icons in the Santo home. We considered monitoring the effigies with surveillance cameras, but I pointed out that, if trickery were involved, it was unlikely that such an investigative technique would be allowed. As Lynn Sherr subsequently reported on the program, "We wanted to do our own test with a surveillance camera in the [home] chapel, but the family prefers to let the commission finish its work first" (Sherr 1998).

On an episode of CBS's 48 Hours titled "Desperate Measures" (1999), a reporter asked Linda Santo how one would know whether someone in the household was simply applying the oil "in the middle of the night." She replied, "You don't know." Samples of oil were independently tested on a few occasions. One analysis by a Pittsburgh laboratory revealed the substance to consist of 80 percent vegetable oil and 20 percent chicken fat, according to The Washington Post, which ordered the test (Weingarten 1998). The presence of chicken fat--which, along with common vegetable oil, is readily available in a home kitchen (consistent with chicken having been deep-fried)--seems particularly revealing. So does one volunteer's observation that there tended to be an increase in oil on effigies on the days pilgrims were expected ("Desperate" 1999).

Much later, when I was involved with a television documentary on the case, the producer tried to arrange for me to visit the Santo home. Linda Santo, I was told, was tentatively agreeable, but, after she consulted a priest who was a behind-the-scenes promoter of alleged phenomena there, she refused. I had clearly become persona non grata, no doubt because of my repeatedly voiced suspicions about the circumstances under which the icons and figurines dripped oil and the hosts (communion wafers) supposedly bled. (I have observed that when I have unrestricted possession of a "miraculous" object it either ceases to perform or I explain the phenomenon [Nickell 2006]).

Miracle healings attributed to Audrey's intercession were also unconvincing. For example, a woman was supposedly healed of liver cancer, but the patient's oncologist pointed out that she had already begun a new cancer treatment and that it had clearly begun to work even before she had gone to see Audrey. The woman continued to regard the remission as a miracle even when the cancer returned, spreading to her brain ("Desperate" 1999). Again, there was the case of a young man injured in a motorcycle accident whose doctors reportedly said he would never walk again; yet, after his mother went to see Audrey, he was able to walk without his crutches. Actually, his personal physician noted that there had been a 75 percent chance that he would indeed walk (Sherr 1998).