Top Ten Greatest Unsolved Mysteries In Hollywood
6. George Reeves
He was upstairs in his Los Angeles bedroom at the time; his fiancée, playwright Leonore Lemmon, was downstairs entertaining three guests when he died.
Reeves had suffered financial problems after the iconic Superman series ended.
The police concluded that Reeves, 45, was depressed because he couldn’t get any further work in Hollywood, and ruled his death a suicide.
But Reeves’ mother refused to believe that her son would kill himself, and the evidence did not corroborate a suicide. The four other guests in the house waited for some considerable time before calling the police, and stray bullet cases were found by the body. This has led many to believe that Reeves was, in fact, a murder victim.
The film “Hollywoodland,” starring Ben Affleck, pursues the homicide angle. Reeves, many allege, had been having an affair with Toni Mannix, the wife of MGM honcho Eddie Mannix, until Reeves jilted her for Lemmon.
Toni, a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, murdered Reeves in a jealous rage. In 1999, a Hollywood publicist declared that Mannix confessed to killing Reeves. However, no proof was offered beyond that claim, so the cause of death remains an official suicide.
