His dena had been in Cotus since 2009. That is the fact that made the investigators who solved the case of 38-year-old Katherine Soul pause before they said anything else when describing the resolution because the database that held the answer had been queried in connection with Catherine’s case four separate times between 2009 and 2022 and had returned no match on any of those four occasions.
His profile was in the system. Catherine’s profile was in the system. They should have matched.
They did not match for 13 years. And the reason they did not match, a single laboratory transcription error made when his sample was entered into the Iowa DNA database in 2009, which created a one-digit mismatch in a key identification marker that prevented the automated comparison algorithm from flagging the connection.
Was the kind of error that happens when people enter data by hand and that had cost Katherine Soul’s family 13 years of an answer that had technically been available since 2009 when cold case investigator Sergeant Dana Lot pulled the sole file in 2023 and requested a full forensic review of the Cotus entries including a manual comparison of the crime scene profile against entries with near matches as well as exact matches.
Is she was doing something that is painstaking and expensive and that most departments defer indefinitely because it requires hours of forensic analyst time for each case reviewed.
She requested it because she had read the original file and believed the answer was somewhere accessible and that the inaccessibility was a product of something other than the absence of evidence.
She was right. The manual comparison found the transcription error inside a week. The corrected entry matched on the following query.
The system had held the answer for 13 years. The man whose COTUS entry had been one-digit wrong since 2009 was a 44year-old Cedar Rapids resident named Douglas Fen.
He had been in the database because of a 2008 assault conviction, the kind of criminal record that requires a dena sample under Iowa law.
The kind that should have connected him to Catherine’s case the moment the crime scene profile was queried.
Instead, a single transcription error had kept him invisible in the system that was designed specifically to find him.
But before we get to that correction and what it revealed, we have to go back to 2007.
Because to understand what was taken from Catherine Soul and what her husband James spent 17 years living without, you first have to understand who she was.
It was September of 2007, and Cedar Rapids sat in the center of Iowa under a fall that had arrived cleanly and confidently, the maples turning fast along the Cedar River corridor, the air dry and cool in the morning, and warm enough by noon to sit outside without a jacket.
The particular quality of an Iowa September that makes people from out of state understand why the people who live there stay.
The city was a midsized Midwestern center of about 120,000. A meatacking and manufacturing and insurance hub that had the comfortable solidity of a place that does not aspire to be somewhere else and has built a genuinely good life on that decision.
Catherine Soul was 38 years old. She was a registered nurse at St. Luke’s Hospital, where she worked the cardiac care unit, a specialized floor that requires both clinical mastery and the emotional intelligence to work with patients who are often frightened about their prognosis and whose families are even more frightened.
Her supervising physician, Dr. Anita Roth described her as one of those nurses who understood that excellent cardiac nursing is not only technical, that a patient who is afraid is a patient whose outcomes are worse, and that the quality of a nurse’s presence in the room is part of the clinical intervention.
She had been at St. Luke’s for 9 years. She was the person the new nurses asked questions of at shift change.
At home, she and James had been married for 11 years and had two daughters, Cassie, nine, and Beth, six, in September of 2007.
The family lived in a Craftsman bungalow in the Kenwood Park neighborhood, three blocks from the elementary school, in the kind of residential stability that families build when they intend to stay.
James was a high school history teacher. They had a vegetable garden in the backyard that Catherine maintained with the same systematic attention she brought to everything.
Labeled rose, a watering schedule, a harvest log she kept in a notebook that also had her daughter’s height measurements recorded on the back pages.
On the evening of September 19th, 2007, Catherine finished her shift at 700 p.m. And stopped at a grocery store on 1 Avenue on her way home.
The receipt showed she purchased several items at 7:24 p.m. She was seen at checkout by the cashier who knew her as a regular.
She left the store. James had the girls at home and was expecting her by 7:45.
At 8:30, he called her cell phone. It went to voicemail. At 9:15, he called her mother.
Catherine’s car was found in the grocery store parking lot. The following morning, the groceries still in the back seat.
She had not made it out of the parking lot. Lynn County Sheriff’s investigators, the lot fell within county jurisdiction, opened the case immediately and with full urgency.
Lead investigator, Detective Paul Abram, worked every lead available. Catherine’s personal and professional life was reviewed completely.
A former nursing colleague who had left St. Luke’s under difficult circumstances was investigated and cleared.
A person who had made unwanted contact with Catherine at the hospital was interviewed twice and also cleared.
Biological evidence from the parking lot was collected and submitted to the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Lab.
A clean DINA profile was generated. It was entered into Cody in November of 2007.
A query was run. No match returned. The answer which had not yet been entered was two years away from being in the system.
It was entered in 2009 incorrectly and queries run in 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022 returned no match because the transcription error prevented the algorithm from flagging it.
James Soul raised Cassie and Beth in the Kenwood Park bungalow. He kept Catherine’s harvest notebook.
He kept her watering schedule taped to the inside of the garden shed. He maintained the vegetable garden every year, following her system, because maintaining it felt like refusing to accept that the system she had built no longer had anyone to tend it.
Cassie and Beth grew up helping him. They are in their 20s now. Cassie is in nursing school.
James made the annual call to the Lynn County Cold Case Unit every September and received updates that were consistently honest about the absence of new developments.
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Sergeant Dana Lot requested the manual COTUS review. In the spring of 2023, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Forensic Analysts completed the near match comparison in 6 days.
The transcription error was identified on day four, a single digit in a marker sequence that had been entered as a seven rather than a one.
A difference that looked significant on a printed form and negligible to the human eye, but that the automated algorithm treated as a disqualifying mismatch across 13 years of queries.
The corrected entry was processed. The next query returned a match. Douglas Fen’s name appeared in the comparison result on a Tuesday afternoon in May 2023, 13 years after it should have appeared the first time.
Douglas Fen was arrested at his Cedar Rapids residence on a Thursday morning in June 2023.
He had been living in the city continuously since 2007. He had served 18 months on the 2008 assault conviction and had been released in 2010.
He had worked since then at a Cedar Rapids manufacturing plant where he had accumulated a work record described by his supervisor as unremarkable.
He showed up, did the job, and went home. He had no further criminal convictions.
He had been in the years since 2010 invisible to every investigative system because the one system that should have flagged him had contained a onedigit error.
When Sergeant Lot and Lynn County investigators arrived at his residence, he answered the door.
He was told what the investigation had found. He said he wanted an attorney. He said nothing further.
He was charged with first-degree murder. He entered a not-uilty plea. His attorney indicated the defense would challenge the validity of the corrected COTUS entry and the chain of custody of the 17-year-old crime scene evidence.
The court ruled the corrected entry and the comparison methodology fully admissible. The trial is scheduled for 2025.
James Soul received the call from Sergeant Lot on a June morning in 2023, 16 years after Catherine had not come home from the grocery store.
He listened to what had happened, the transcription error, the 13 years of missed queries, the manual review, the correction, the match.
He was quiet for a long time. Then he asked, “Was it always in there?”
Lot told him it had been in the database since 2009. He said Cassie was 12 in 2009.
Beth was 8. He did not say anything else on the subject of what those years had contained.
He said he would like to tell the girls himself. Lot said, of course. Cassie Soul, now 26 and in her final year of nursing school at the University of Iowa, made a statement that appeared in local news coverage.
She said that she had chosen nursing in part because of her mother, because of the kind of nurse her father had described her mother being, the kind who understood that a patients fear was part of the clinical picture.
She said she intended to be that kind of nurse. She said her mother had been building something in the Kenwood Park garden every year for 9 years before she was killed and that her father had kept building it for 17 years after and that she was going to keep building it too.
Catherine Soul kept a harvest notebook with her daughter’s heights on the back pages. She worked a cardiac care unit and understood that fear is part of the clinical picture.
She was 38 years old in a grocery store parking lot on a September evening and she did not make it home.
And the answer was in a database for 13 years with one digit wrong. One digit, not a missing sample, not an absence of evidence, one digit entered incorrectly by hand in 2009 that the automated system treated as a disqualifying mismatch for 13 years.
While James maintained the garden and Cassie chose nursing and Beth grew up and the annual September calls continued to produce nothing because the system was holding the answer the wrong way.
Sergeant Lot asked for the manual review. That request, time-consuming, expensive, the kind of thing that gets deferred indefinitely in departments with limited forensic budgets, is the reason the 17-year-old answer came out of the system in 2023 instead of remaining in it forever.
One request, one analyst, 6 days, one digit corrected. What do you think the families of cold case victims should know about the possibility that transcription errors like this one exist in COTUS entries across the country?
That some answers may be in the system wrong? And what does Cassie’s choice of nursing tell you about the long reach of a parents example?
Does a systematic error like this change who is responsible? The system, the person who made the entry, the investigative decisions that didn’t include a manual review sooner.
Leave your thoughts in the comments. Justice came for Catherine Soul after 17 years. Stories like hers are why this channel exists.
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