60 Minutes - 9/6/2020: The Ranger and the Serial Killer, Mind Reading, The Resurrection of St. Nicholas

Episode Date: September 7, 2020

In an interview with Sharyn Alfonsi, Texas Ranger James Holland talks about how he got serial killer Samuel Little to confess to his crimes. How often have you wondered what your spouse is really thinking? Or your boss? Or the guy sitting across from you on the bus? Lesley Stahl reports on scientific research to answer these questions. Nearly 20 years after being destroyed on September 11, 2001, a New York City church is being resurrected. Scott Pelley reports. Those stories on this week's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. The first thing I picked up on is how wicked smart he was. Smart. Oh, like genius. Absolutely. Texas Ranger James Holland is talking about the most prolific serial killer in American history, Samuel Little. Where did you kill the most? As you'll hear, the Ranger is determined to solve the murders Little committed in 19 states. She was laughing while I was killing her.

With hours of conversations and works of art produced from a serial killer's photographic memory. Who among us hasn't wished we could read someone else's mind? Well, we've been following studies that are doing just that, identifying patterns in the brain that can reveal what a person is actually feeling. I think the emotion is envy. Wow. That was correct. What were you thinking for envy? Is this personal? I was just thinking of beautiful models. Last Easter, we visited a fortress against time

where art is created to help heal one of America's greatest wounds. It is the story of the resurrection of the only house of worship destroyed on 9-11. The good of mankind can conquer evil, no matter what. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink.

And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card, and then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash VI Porter

to learn more. Tonight, you're going to hear about the man the FBI is calling the most prolific serial killer in the history of the United States. As we first reported last October, his name is Samuel Little. And over the course of a year and a half, he confessed to 93 murders. That's more than were committed by Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer combined. No one would have known the scale of Little's crimes if not for a Texas Ranger who had a hunch. Little had never confessed to anyone about anything, but over the course of 700 hours of interviews, Ranger James Holland coaxed the 80-year-old into revealing his life's work. The confessions have enabled investigators across the country

to solve dozens of cold cases, but Holland needs help to match up the rest. It's why the Texas Ranger is telling us the story of how he got America's deadliest serial killer to confess. With a swagger that would make John Wayne envious, Texas Ranger James Holland arrived last summer at the California State Prison. He was escorted to the interview room for another round with Samuel Little, the killer who went undetected for nearly half a century. When you come up in there, you... Don't be fooled by his grandfatherly appearance. I got away with numerous murders of women in my life over a span of 50 years. Ninety-three murders in 19 states from 1970 to 2005. Now, near the end of his own life and out of appeals, Little has been spilling his secrets to Ranger Holland over the course of several interviews since May of 2018. Where did you kill the most?

Oh, that's easy. Florida and California. What city did you kill the most in? Miami and Los Angeles. How many did you kill in Los Angeles? Los Angeles, approximately 20. So how did you kill in Los Angeles? Los Angeles, approximately 20. So how did he skip by so long? He was so good at what he did. You know, how did you get away with it, Sammy?

Did the crime left town? The drifter from Ohio preyed upon the fringes of society. Prostitutes, drug addicts, women he believed the police wouldn't work too hard to find. The ranger says Little was a cunning killer who sized up his victims and his surroundings. The first thing I picked up on is how wicked smart he was. Smart? Oh, like genius. Why? Why do you say that?

Oh, well, number one, you know, the photographic memory, his memory for details. You're like, tell me what's around her. There's three tombstones over there. There's a Caliche Road, drive down a quarter mile. There's a white Baptist church that needs to be whitewashed. Phenomenal. For example, Little remembered unusual arches close to the spot where he killed a woman outside of Miami. Sure enough, when Miami detectives investigated, they saw the arches. Little had

strangled Miriam Chapman near those arches in 1976. You've never felt like he sent you on some wild goose chase? No. Nothing he has ever said has been proven to be wrong or false. We've been able to prove up almost everything he said. Mr. Little. Because of Little's confessions, judges and prosecutors nationwide have been able to close long-standing cases. What is your plea to the charge of murder? Guilty. Here was Little via a video link from his prison last August, pleading guilty to two stranglings in Cincinnati. In just over a year, 50 cold cases that had been dormant for decades were solved due to the detailed confessions Little provided to the ranger. Tell me about North Little Rock.

Tell me what that girl looked like. They had a buck team. They had a gap between them two. Little grows disturbingly animated as he describes how he strangled his victims. So how do you reach a serial killer? How do you get them to talk? You avoid the things that normally work for investigators. What do you mean by that? You avoid things like, you know, remorse and closure for the family.

Because they don't have remorse and they don't care about closure. No, no, it doesn't appeal to them at all. I mean, you're asking them to open up their soul to the things that are more intimate to them than anything in life. Why should they do that with you? And that's what you're working for. This skinny black girl, real friendly. She was laughing when I was killing her. With Sammy, there's indications of visualization of when he's thinking about a crime scene, he'll start stroking his face And as he's starting to picture a victim, you'll see him look out and up. And you

can tell he has this revolving carousel of victims and it's just spinning and he's waiting for it to stop at the one that he wants to talk about. Investigators had discovered that Little liked to sketch. Ranger Holland gave him art supplies, wondering if he might be able to use his remarkable memory to draw his victims. And he has. Wow. These are all of his drawings. These are all his. They're pretty detailed.

Is there one that you looked at and you knew right away, oh, that's... There's a lot of them. Really? Yeah, as soon as we matched it up. How many has he sketched? There's some around 50. The note on this one's super creepy. Sam killed me, but I love him.

He writes notes, and some of the drawings commentate. Tall girl by the highway. Right. Girl in a strip joint. Right. Left in the woods. 1972? Right, yes.

And we've matched that one up. You have? Yes, it's a New Orleans murder. I can't remember the person who checked me out of the hotel this morning. If someone gave me a million dollars to draw her face, I couldn't do it. The fact that he can still do this. Right. He basically takes a photograph in his mind of exactly what he sees as he leaves them. Two and a half years ago, Ranger Holland had never heard of Samuel Little. Little was rotting away in this prison at the edge of California's Mojave Desert,

sentenced to three life terms in 2014 for strangling three women. In court, prosecutors had labeled Little a sexual predator. He denied everything and was defiant to the end. But the FBI noted that Little had somehow skirted charges for violent crimes year after year in state after state in places where women disappeared, including Texas. That drew the interest of Ranger James Holland, a skilled interviewer who says he's convinced dozens of killers to confess during his career. Typically when people want you involved in a case, they want you there because why? Virtually every single case that I ever deal with, there's no DNA evidence,

there's no forensics, there's no nothing. And there was nothing linking Samuel Little to additional murders, just suspicions. The ranger was intrigued by a cold case in Odessa, Texas. Denise Brothers was a prostitute working on the wrong side of town. Then she went missing in 1994. We looked everywhere. Her son Damien remembers driving around Odessa with his grandparents looking for her. A month later, Denise Brothers' body was found at the back of an abandoned parking lot dumped in brush.

We're asked to come down and look at the body. You had to do that? Yeah. How old were you? 14. That sticks do that? Yeah. How old were you? 14. That sticks with you? Yeah. For 24 years, Damien didn't know who killed his mother or why.

Ranger Holland learned Denise Brothers had been strangled and that Samuel Little was in West Texas at the time. Did Sammy do it? I don't know, but I felt like there was a reasonable probability that he did it. To find out if his instinct was right, the ranger went to Southern California to interview Little, who had always been hostile to law enforcement. Did I believe he was going to confess?

Complete arrogance on my part, absolutely. And for the first couple minutes, it really was going quite poorly. Oh, horrible. He's raging. Oh, yes. Little vented in the interview room for 30 minutes that he had been wrongly depicted as a rapist. There was no doubt in my mind that Samuel Little was not a rapist, but I told him he knew it and I knew it, that he was a killer. And he stops and he kind of looks at me for a second. He didn't seem to mind it. And then you could see in his eyes as he's looking away and he falls back as I say the word killer. And that appealed to him. That's how he defines himself. As a killer. Yes. Was there a moment where you said, I've got him?

Yeah, when he talked about there may be three victims in Texas. Three victims, and one of them was in Odessa, Texas. All of a sudden we turned to each other, oh my gosh, he's talking about Odessa. And we grab our files and start going through and checking what he's talking about and verifying. Christy Palazzolo of the FBI and Angela Williamson of the Department of Justice analyzed violent crimes. They were listening to the interview across the hall and had access to the FBI database and the Denise brothers' file. You've got the photos of the crime scene in front of you. Did it match up right away?

Oh, yes. And he had details? Yes. That hadn't been reported? Extreme details. Like what? In Denise's case, he remembered that she wore a denture. The autopsy confirmed Brothers did wear a denture. All the details matched. Samuel Little had killed Denise Brothers. Ranger Holland knew he was on to something big. He schemed to have Little extradited to Texas for a few months so he could talk to him around the clock and extract more confessions. I would think Texas with the death penalty is the last place a killer like Stanley Little wants to go.

You know, basically what I told him was, I can go to the district attorney and I can ask him to take the death penalty off the table. And I believe that he will do that. Which was especially brazen since Ranger Holland had never met the district attorney in Odessa, Bobby Bland. And he said, I'd like a letter from you on your letterhead saying that you would waive the death penalty. And I said, well, you know, that's a pretty tall order just to do blindly.

So why? Why did you do it? There's a greater good. The strange ranger that was calling me from California telling me he had a serial killer. I put my faith in him. The next morning, the letter waiving the death penalty was in Samuel Little's hands. The ranger sent a plane to whisk Little to Texas,

where he was housed in the Wise County Jail. For 48 straight days, for hours on end, the two men sat in a small room. During that time, Little confessed to 65 of his murders. The ranger plied Little with pizza and Dr. Pepper to keep the stories flowing. People will hear this and go, why were you treating a serial killer so well? What do I say to that? I say that we can have one case or we can have 93 cases. It was in your best interest for him to be comfortable. Oh, absolutely. Yes, yes.

So why you? Why did he finally confess to you? At the end of the day, maybe Sammy just liked me. Today, Little is back at the California State Prison. We wanted to interview him on camera, but state law won't allow it, so we asked him to call us. He did, answering our questions for nearly an hour. We wondered why he decided to confess now. Are you worried that there might be innocent people in jail for some of your crimes? Probably be numerous people who are convicted and sent to detention on my behalf. I say if I can help get somebody out of jail,

God might smile a little bit more on me. For most of our call, Little spoke of his victims. It was uncomfortable to listen to his graphic stories. Towards the end of the interview, we asked him to reflect on the depths of his crimes. I think I'm the only one in the did what I'd like you to do. I think there's only one in the world, and that's not an honor. That is a curse. With Little's old age, failing health, and a fear that his memory could slip, there is urgency to figure out who and where the rest of his victims are. It's kind of like never ending. You have to continue. You have to finish it.

Ranger Holland's been encouraging Little to keep drawing. Three new sketches recently arrived at the Ranger's Texas office. Three new faces last seen in the mind of the most prolific serial killer in American history. Since our story first aired, law enforcement has matched another 10 victims to Samuel Little. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. Stay three nights this summer at Best Western and get $50 off a future stay. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. Whoa, is that the new Kia Sportage?

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since our thoughts are, more than anything else, our own. Private, personal, unreachable, or at least that's what we've always, well, thought. As we reported last fall, advances in neuroscience have shown that on a physical level, our thoughts are actually a vast network of neurons firing all across our brains. So if that brain activity could be identified and analyzed, could our thoughts be decoded? Could our minds be read? Well, a team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has spent more than a decade trying to do just that. We started our reporting on their work 10 years ago,

and what they've discovered since has drawn us back. In Carnegie Mellon's scanner room, two floors underground, a steady stream of research subjects come to have their brains and thoughts read in this MRI machine. It's a type of scanning called functional MRI, fMRI. All right, we'll queue it up and then we'll start. That looks at what's happening inside the brain as a person thinks. It's like being an astronomer when the first telescope is discovered or being a biologist when the first microscope is developed. Neuroscientist Marcel Just says this technology has made it possible for the first time to see the physical makeup of our thoughts.

Okay, are you ready to get started? When we first visited Dr. Just's lab 10 years ago, he and his team had conducted a study. They put people in the scanner and asked them to think about 10 objects, five of them tools like screwdriver and hammer, and five of them dwellings like igloo and castle, while measuring activity levels throughout their brains. The idea was to crunch the data and try to identify distinctive patterns of activity for each object. You had them think about a screwdriver and the computer found the place in the brain where that person was thinking screwdriver? Screwdriver isn't one place in the brain, it's many

places in the brain. When you think of a screwdriver, you think about how you hold it, how you twist it, what it looks like. And each of those functions are in different places? Correct. He showed us that by dividing the brain into thousands of tiny cubes and analyzing the amount of activity in each one, his team was able to identify unique patterns for each object. You're reading their mind. We're identifying the thought that's occurring. It's incredible, just incredible. Incredible, but only the beginning. In the decades since, Professor Just's lab has taken this technique

and applied it far beyond hammers and igloos to increasingly complex thoughts. This is basic science, knowledge for knowledge's sake, not trying to cure disease, but to understand the fundamental workings of our bodies, and in this case, of our minds. One of Dr. Just's main questions was whether he could find patterns for abstract ideas. So he did a study asking people to think about forgiveness, gossip, spirituality. Could they be identifiable in the brain the way the screwdriver was? Remarkably, the answer was yes. This was the activation pattern when people thought about spirituality.

And this was gossip. One of my favorite subjects. And you see a slightly different pattern. One difference between the two was in areas of the brain scientists had already shown become active when we think about other people, circled in blue. Those areas lit up bright red when subjects thought about gossip, not so much for spirituality. In another study, Dr. Jost tested whether patterns are the same when people think in different languages. They are. And he's asked acting students to conjure up emotions in the scanner to see if feelings have distinctive activation patterns too. And what did you find?

Each emotion had its own characteristic values, and you could tell which one was which. And it's the same in every head. Amazingly, it was common across people. Common across people? Does that mean we could put our colleague, associate producer Jamie Woods, into a scanner for the first time, and Dr. Justine would be able to identify her emotions? So she's seeing words. For nine seconds each, Jamie's job was to think of little scenarios that would conjure up the feelings on the screen. After she came out... Welcome back.

Thank you. A computer program took the brain activation data gathered by the scanner and tried to decode her thoughts. So what were you thinking about for disgust? I was thinking of someone throwing up on me at like a baseball game. So could the computer read her brain patterns and tell what she'd been feeling? The program's answer is, I think the emotion is disgust. The experienced emotion was actually disgust. That was correct. Awesome. Next. I think the emotion is envy. What were you thinking

for envy? I was just thinking a beautiful model. The computer program got all of Jamie's emotions right. It's reading what Jamie's feeling. And it's funny, isn't it, because it's so personal. We all think of our own thoughts as so individual, so intimate. How could anybody else's thoughts be like mine? And they are. It's feelings, too. Yes, feelings.

Now, obviously, people think very different thoughts. But it's, you know, like people choose to do different things with their bodies, but they all walk putting one foot in front of the other. Nobody walks sideways. Nobody walks backwards systematically. There's something about the biological apparatus that makes you act in a certain way with your body. And I don't think we realize the degree to which the biological apparatus

that we have in our skulls governs, shapes the way we think. Professor Just's goal is to one day create a dictionary of brain activation, a key to what all different thoughts look like inside our minds. But he also started wondering whether those definitions a key to what all different thoughts look like inside our minds. But he also started wondering whether those definitions might be different in people with disorders like autism. Okay, you're going to swing your legs up at this end. Prior research had found structural differences in the brains of people with autism. So the question was whether thought patterns might differ too.

Hi, Jeff. This is Rob. How are you doing? Dr. Justine recruited 17 adults with autism and asked them, as well as 17 control subjects, to think about social interactions like adore, hug, humiliate, challenging terrain for many with autism. The results were striking. The activation patterns differed enough to tell who had autism and who didn't with 97% accuracy. The people with autism thought of these social interactions apart from themselves. MARGARET WARNER, As he showed us in these findings for the word hug, the key differences were in brain regions that activate when we think about ourselves, circled in blue. Right there. DR.

JOHN KERRY, There and there, those areas light up much more among the controls. MARGARET WARNER, Whereas the autism subjects showed far less activation. DR. JOHN KERRY, They thought of it more like a definition of hug without self-involvement. And that you saw it with word after word? Yes. I just thought, wow, this is the coolest thing I've heard in I don't know how long. David Brent is a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

where he runs a clinic for suicidal adolescents. He happened to attend a talk Marcel Just was giving about his autism findings and immediately wondered about his own patients. So I went up to him afterwards and I said, would you be interested in talking about maybe doing a study on suicide? You hear about cases of suicide where the person had been depressed, but you also hear of situations where people say, there was nothing wrong. Suicide is a great mystery because the person who knows the most about why it happened isn't there to talk with. You try to reconstruct what happened, but nobody has a window into people's, you know, interior thoughts. Nobody, that is, except someone with a mind-reading device. Doctors Just and Brent began planning a pilot study to see if the scanner

might reveal what is altered in the thoughts of people contemplating suicide. They reached out to Matt Nock, a Harvard professor, who has studied how difficult it is for doctors and emergency rooms to know which patients are safe to send home. Is this the first time anybody's looked inside the brain to see about suicidal thoughts? Yes. This is the first study I've ever heard of where someone's looked in the brain of someone who's suicidal, who's actively thinking about death or suicide. You don't see life as something that's going to be fixed.

The only way to get out of it is to kill yourself. Dan Toski, a former patient at Dr. Brent's clinic, volunteered to participate in the study to help scientists better understand suicidal thinking. Do you think in terms of the word pain? Pain is when you break a limb or you have a migraine and it hurts so bad that you can't see. This, being depressed and suicidal, it's much greater. Much greater. Much greater than pain.

To be in the study subjects had to have had suicidal thoughts within the prior month. They and control subjects were asked to think about words like funeral and death as well as positive words including praise, good, and carefree. In both categories, the suicidal group differed from controls.

This is the group that's thinking about suicide. As with the autism study, the key differences turned out to be in those self-related areas. They lit up bright red among suicidal subjects when they thought about death-related words. I give you the word funeral. You know, what do you think about? Maybe your grandmother's funeral or something like that? A suicidal person is much more likely to say my funeral. For positive words, the findings were exactly the opposite.

When the non-suicidal controls thought about the word carefree, they thought about something that involved themselves. Suicidal subjects significantly less so. Did you ever imagine that you could ask people to think about the word carefree and you'd be able to tell if someone was having suicidal thoughts? No.

It's a breakthrough idea. It's a lot of fun if you're a basic scientist to discover how things work, but there's an extra level of gratification when you learn that it's possibly helpful and useful. This work is still in its infancy. Doctors Just, Brent, and Nock are doing a larger NIH-funded study to collect more data. And while for now it's too costly and cumbersome to put people into MRI scanners to see if it's safe to release them

from the hospital, if they could come up with an easier way to do this. Absolutely. Just like the first GPS was, you know, a big computer in a big room, and now it's in all of our phones. If there's a way to, a few steps down the road, make much more compact this approach and bring it into emergency rooms and outpatient clinics, it could go a huge way towards moving forward clinical care. But as this technology advances toward fulfilling its full promise, it's hard not to also wonder about its peril. Will it ever be possible to read someone's thoughts precisely? The thoughts are there precisely. If you could just get close enough to the electrical activity. You think one day we'll figure out how to do that? Yes. Which means that we'll never be able to have our thoughts

completely secure within ourselves. I think it will be technologically possible to invade people's thoughts, but it's our societal obligation to make sure that never happens. It's a real privilege to be able to travel and to see different places taking yourself out comfortable positions and challenging yourself no one builds a legacy by standing still start your journey at remover.com construction resumed last month on the only house of worship destroyed on 9-11. As we reported last spring, the faithful have spent nearly 20 years struggling to rebuild St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church into a national shrine at Ground Zero.

At times opposed by the powerful, sabotaged by human frailty, the project is rising again, thanks to those who never lost faith in the resurrection of St. Nicholas. In 1922, a tavern found religion. During Prohibition, Greek immigrants consecrated a lower Manhattan bar with a cross. The first time I walked in, and I saw the little place in there, beautiful little place, I felt something. Bill Terrazonis was the last caretaker of St. Nicholas.

It was my pride and joy. You called the place Uncle Nick. That's the first thing when I walked in, says, hi, Uncle Nick, how are you? That was my thing. Uncle Nick was traditional. The tomb of Jesus was carried through streets on Easter. On the epiphany, the cross was raised from the river,

symbolizing the baptism of Jesus. His face was humble, but inside there was soul, rich images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints known as iconography. Developers coveted the land, but the lone church stood its ground. They were set that no one was going to take their church. My father spoke for all. There was going to take their church. My father spoke for all.

There was not to be any compromise. Regina Katapothi's father, Jimmy Magnantes, was president of the church and frustrated developers for 34 years. He said they offered me $15 million, and I said no. There was absolutely no hesitation about it. There was even a time that the archdiocese itself wanted to sell the church. How could he turn down the archdiocese? My father was a man of principle, and a church is a body of people.

All he had to do was say no. For eight decades, St. Nicholas remained defiant at 155 cedar street an address that would mark its place in history before we knew it hell broke loose bill terrazonis was there on 9 11. the building just went like this what's going going on here? And then I walk outside. That was the worst thing in my life. A landing gear wheel bounded into the parking lot. Terrazonis opened his van to find human remains across his seat. He fled on foot just before Tower 2 collapsed. That's when you knew that St. Nicholas was gone? Yep.

I lost part of me. I lost part of me. What's the kind of fall? The days that followed yielded only fragments. We'll find more, Father. We will. We will. Greek Archbishop Dimitrios on the left comforted rescue workers. A group of workers came and they said,

we would like to ask you to pray for us. I say, why? They said, here, as we work, we know that we deal also with remnants of human bodies. Please pray for us. Among the dead was 31-year-old John Katsimatithis, a bondbroker in one of the towers, who had discovered St. Nicholas on a lunch hour.

His sister, Anthula Katsimatithis, told us his remains were never found. I don't have a gravesite to visit, and it's incredibly difficult because we never buried anything or, you know, said goodbye. What was it about the church that was so special to your brother? With all these buildings and concrete, I think he felt, I know, that he probably felt at peace lighting a candle and just saying a prayer for whatever was going on. Those buildings in concrete became the 9-11 Memorial, and plans were drawn for a small domed church, the St. Nicholas National Shrine. But as the congregation prayed at the site each year,

there were delays and a budget that quadrupled to $85 million. Construction began in 2015. The dome rose a year later. But in 2017, the money from private donations ran out. Construction stopped. Only faith kept St. Nicholas alive, as we discovered 5,000 miles away. On the Greek coast, Mount Athos is a hermit peninsula of 20 ancient Orthodox monasteries.

Behind the walls of the Xenophontos Monastery, work on St. Nicholas never wavered. Xenophontos is one of the oldest monasteries on Manathos. The first historical witness we have is from the year 998. Father Jeremiah hails from a town named for a saint, San Angelo, Texas. This is where God wanted me, and here I am. You've been here how long? 22 years. The Xenophantos Monastery is a fortress against time. About 50 monks live at this monastery. There's traditional tasks, or what we call obediences, in the monastery.

The monks who work in the refectory, the monks who work in the garden, the monks who work among the olive trees, among others. We have, of course, the iconographers, who are very, very cultivated and have really mastered their art form. Master iconographer Father Lucas is painting the iconography for the new St. Nicholas in the old craft of egg tempera. God has called me to do this work, to communicate the spirit of Mount Athos to the people. Father Lucas granted us an early look at 56 icons for the project. He painted St. Nicholas by tradition as the patron of seafarers,

lifting a man from a violent sea. But what's troubling these waters is 9-11. I personally want this church, through the iconography, to open up a new horizon for people, that they will come away with hope. If this happens, the icons have fulfilled their purpose. Near Father Lucas' studio, we met the designer of the church at Ground Zero,

Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. He'd been to Mount Athos twice before for inspiration. You know, I wonder, what does an architect see when we walk through this courtyard? I believe, you see, that you do not need to be an architect or know a lot about the history of architecture to feel architecture. It's like music or something like that.

You have just to open your heart. For St. Nicholas in Manhattan, his inspiration came from the Hagia Sophia, the former Orthodox church in Istanbul. Inside, Calatrava sketched an icon of Mary, and he thought, since she carried Christ, her body was a church. So there is herself, became a kind of temple, isn't it?

Containing something that, according to the Orthodox faith, you know, is almost uncontainable, you know, which it is the idea of God. The vestments of the new St. Nicholas will be white marble crowned with a translucent dome. At night, it will be a beacon. Light, very important. Why is the light very important?

You know, light in my eyes is to architecture. This what sound is to music. Light, candlelight, illuminated the Easter celebration on our visit to Mount Athos in 2018. Abbot Alexios led the procession and at midnight quoted the angel in the Book of Mark. He is risen. He is not here. In the sanctuary, chandeliers were propelled into orbits to symbolize the joint celebration on earth and in heaven. Recalling the psalm,

Praise him, sun and moon, Praise praise him all you stars of lights. But in Manhattan, there has been little sound or light since construction stopped in 2017. An investigation into finances revealed that millions meant for St. Nicholas were spent on other expenses of the archdiocese. About three and a half million dollars was used elsewhere by the archdiocese, is that correct? It was a transferring of money from the St. Nicholas to another kind of account. Afterwards, we heard about that. I asked, why you did that?

I said, you should not have touched the St. Nicholas money at all. For no matter what, it was a mistake, has been corrected. The money was returned. Last year, Archbishop Dimitrios resigned. A new archbishop and New York State named an independent board to raise the last $45 million and manage construction. Fresh hope for Anthula Kastamatithis, who lost her brother. I know that once St. Nicholas opens,

my mom and I will visit and say a prayer for John there. A place of love and hope for all family members and for all people from around the world who are going to come and visit and pay their respects to everyone that died that day. Last summer, Father Lucas left his refuge on Mount Athos for Manhattan to take the measure of God's empty gallery. He told us the walls anticipating his paintings represent the most important work of his life.

The feeling is familiar to Regina Katapothis, whose father had refused to sell the old church. I'm in it for my dad and for everybody else that has gone and perished and hoping with their last breath that they would be able to see St. Nicholas rebuilt. A hundred years from now, what will that little church on the plaza say to the world? That the good of mankind can conquer evil, no matter what. It was the Orthodox Church that made the cross the symbol of Christianity. But during construction, it was discovered the dome of St. Nicholas alone had reached the maximum height allowed by a higher power,

the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which controls the site. In another act of salvation, officials decided a few more feet of heaven could be spared. If all goes well, and it rarely has, St. Nicholas will be born again next year on the 20th anniversary of 9-11, a monument to death and life and unremitting faith. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.