Some sleuths believe the key to the mystery of George Reeve’s’ death lies in his romantic history. Before he got together with Leonore Lemmon, he was romantically entangled with Toni Mannix, the wife of powerful MGM “fixer” to the stars Eddie Mannix, who is rumored to have had a serious mob connection. Reeves eventually left Toni for the much younger Lemmon, which has in turn sparked rumors of a lingering resentment that eventually led to Reeve’s murder. Toni was famous for her firebrand temper, and her husband was just the sort of person who could make difficult problems disappear.
While that all sounds like wild speculation, Toni’s husband was by all accounts a frightening figure, and he was rumored to have killed his first wife in 1937. Worse still, for one reason or another, Toni herself seems to have believed that Reeves was assassinated. The night of the shooting, she allegedly phoned another “Superman” star, Phyllis Coates, at 4.30 a.m. “hyperventilating and ranting.” According to Coates, she proclaimed (per The Guardian), “The boy is dead. He’s been murdered.”
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True or not, the rumors about Toni were given new life in 1999 when publicist Edward Lozzi claimed that he had heard her confess the murder to her priest. The jilted ex supposedly admitted that her and Mannix had orchestrated the killing, hoping to clear her conscience shortly before she died.
