Léon Verneuil

In Drame en trois actes, the French adaptation of Agatha Christie's Three Act Tragedy for the TV series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie, Léon Verneuil is a colleague of Alice Avril and a fellow reporter of "La Voix du Nord". He teases Alice when he sees that Alice, who had told her colleagues that she would be taking a vacation, had joined a local acting class instead. Léon then joins the same class to taunt her. However his antics come to an end when he collapses after having a drink during a party at the acting school. He is the first of a series of poisoning deaths, and he is a rough parallel of Stephen Babbington from the original novel.

Like in the original novel, the glass did not have any trace of poison, but Laurence concludes almost immediately that it could have been switched. A postmortem quickly concludes that he had been poisoned. Alice dislikes Léon intensely and considers him a spy for the editor. Earlier on she tells him to stop harassing her and threatens that she will kill him if he does not. Tricard overhears this and considers Alice a prime suspect. But just like in the original, he is the first victim of an elaborate plan by the Charles Cartwright parallel in this adaptation, Herbert Michel. There are a number of differences. Unlike Babbington, Léon is not a random victim killed by way of a rehearsal. Léon had to be killed first because of what he was doing. Grégoire, another acting class student who befriends Alice, he had been to the same boarding school as Léon. Léon worked for a rag newspaper at that time as well, and liked to dig into people's secrets and expose them. When Laurence finally caught Herbert, he confessed that Léon was already digging into and making some inroads into uncovering the backgrounds of the Macha Semenoff (secretly his wife), Richard Nobel (the Bartholomew Strange parallel) and himself. He planned to kill Macha in order to marry Marlene but if Macha died (even as an apparent suicide) and then he married Marlene soon after, Léon might suspect something, did further and stumble on the truth. Therefore Léon had to be killed first to clear the way for the rest of the plan.

Unlike the glasses at Sir Charles Cartwright's party, the ones here were not on a tray and taken at random by the guests. In this case Herbert handed Léon's glass directly to him. This was a risky procedure. Alice just happened to be nearby and intercepted the glass, thinking it was for her. However, she relinquished the glass to Léon and so Herbert's plan succeeded.