Murder Monday #8 George Reeves

     George Reeves was born as George Keefer Brewer on January 5, 1914, in Woolstock, Iowa. His parents separated soon after he was born and eventually he and his mother moved to California. His mother married Frank Joseph Bessolo and he adopted Geroge as his son in 1927. The marriage lasted for 15 years and they separated when Reeves was away visiting relatives and when he returned his mother told him Bessolo had committed suicide. Once he got in high school, Reeves started acting and singing in high school and then became a student at Pasadena Junior College, where he continued acting.

  We're gonna skip a lot of his acting career, but the TL:dr of his filmography was that his film career started in 1939 as one of the suitors of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (where he was incorrectly listed as Brent Tarleton,) then was in several B-pictures, two with Ronald Reagan and three with James Cagney, co-star in Lydia with Merle Oberon, was in Charlie Chan's Dead Men Tell, five Hopalong Cassidy westerns, and a number of small films, (honestly I only recognized Gone With the Wind.) In June of 1951, Reeves was offered the role of Superman in the television series, Adventures of Superman. He didn't want to take the role because like a lot of stars at the time, they saw television unimportant, but took it anyways. He was Superman in Superman and the Mole Men, which actually became the pilot for the TV series and his role of Superman created him into a national celebrity. He wasn't able to get much more acting roles due to the strict shooting schedule of the show, although he had enough time to start up an affair with Toni Mannix, the wife of MGM's general manager Eddie Mannix, and after two seasons, Reeves was dissatisfied with the salary and the show's one-dimensional role. He went and established his own production company and was in the works of creating his own TV series, Port of Entry, but the producers of Superman offered him a raise and he returned. In 1958, Reeves and Toni Mannix split in 1958 and Reeves announced his engagement to Leonore Lemmon. The plan was for them to get married on June 19 and spend their honeymoon in Tijuana. Towards the end of his life, he would complain about his financial problems, where he was planning on directing a low-budget sci-fi film written by Phyllis Coates, a friend from Pasadena and his first Lois Lane, but they were unable to finance the film.  And so on June 16, 1959, George Reeves died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in the upstairs bedroom of his home.

   As the story goes, Reeves and Lemmon had been out drinking earlier in the evening and had an argument in the restaurant. After they got home and Reeves had gone to bed, around midnight, Bliss and Carol Van Ronkel arrived at the Reeves home, and an impromptu party began. Reeves came down, angrily at first but eventually stayed with the guest for a while, drinking more, and then returned upstairs in a bad mood. Eventually, the guest heard a single gunshot from upstairs. Bliss Van Ronkel ran upstairs and found Reeves lying across the bed dead, his body facing upward and his feet on the floor, with a.30 caliber Luger pistol between his feet. The police were called almost an hour later, probably due to shock, how late it was, and the fact they were all very drunk. His death was ruled a suicide although there were a few factors that make you question: the gun was wiped clean of fingerprints; there was no gunpowder residue on Reeves, although, in 1959, gunshot residue testing wasn't routinely performed; and there were two additional bullets found embedded in the bedroom floor, even though the guests all claim they heard only one shot. Eventually, a second autopsy was performed, but the only new information that was found was a series of bruises of unknown origin about the head and body, but ultimately was still declared a suicide. Rumors spread that Lemmon was at least near the bedroom when Reeves was shot and she came back downstairs after the shot was fired saying "Tell them I was down here, tell them I was down here!" Others believed that Eddie Mannix, who was rumored to have mafia ties, had ordered Reeves killed, probably due to the affair Reeves had with his wife. In 1999, Edward Lozzi, and LA publicist said that Toni Mannix had confessed to a Catholic priest in Lozzi's presence that she was responsible for having Reeves' killed; but Mannix suffered from Alzheimer's and senile dementia.