Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Hi and welcome to this week's proof sidebar. I'm here this week's proof

sidebar. I'm here this week which is into Davis and Kevin Fitzpatrick to discuss

episode 8 of our series on the cases of Lee Clark and Kane's story.

And this week we heard about Sergeant Dallas Battle.

To me, Dallas Battle has always been at the center of the controversy surrounding this case.

I mean when I first learned about the story, he sort of you know if not the first and one of the first names that came up and there was just a lot of questions about could he had done something improper or him really holding all of the answers to what happened with this investigation.

So it was about time and really interesting to step through the look at Dallas Battle himself.

I was really looking forward to interviewing him for quite a while and then unfortunately he passed away just shortly before we started getting fully into this case and working on it and actually making trips down to Rome so we never got a chance to.

And I don't know if he would talk to us. Part of me tells myself that he wouldn't talk to us anyway,

so we didn't miss out on anything, but...

I still remember actually getting the message that he had passed away

because, I mean, it couldn't have been more than a week or two before the first trip to Rome and I think it was a text chain between the three of us.

Yeah, it was earlier that month, but he'd been in ill health for a while, I believe. And now Dallas was one of two officers who worked the most in this case, although he was the one who was at the start of the case, he was the lead officer, so he was the one who was the start of the case, he was the

one who was the most about it, but we're still hopeful to speak to David Stewart, who was the other

investigator who worked on it. It feels like people want to talk about it.

They want to make comments about battle on the record,

but they can't, you know, they're being told they can't talk to us for one reason or another by Floyd County Police Department in DA's office.

And plus, there's the obvious, like no one wants to speak ill of the dead.

It's, you know, an awkward and unfortunate topic and he is not here to defend himself.

So in that sense, no, it's not fair that there's no one to speak up for him, but that doesn't mean his story shouldn't be told because it's a huge part of this case.

Yeah, and I do think that you have both offered people the opportunity to speak on his behalf and they've declined either

because they've been told they can't speak or they or they simply declined. I mean I was

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