<Li> Philip Lombard, a soldier of fortune . Literally down to his last square meal, he comes to the island with a loaded revolver, as suggested by his invitation letter . Lombard is accused of causing the deaths of a number of East African tribesmen, after stealing their food and abandoning them to their deaths . He and Marston are the only guests to openly and immediately confirm that the accusations against them are true; neither feels any remorse . ("Story's quite true! I left' em! Matter of self - preservation . We were lost in the bush . I and a couple of other fellows took what food there was and cleared out...Not quite the act of a pukka sahib, I'm afraid . But self - preservation's a man's first duty . And natives don't mind dying, you know . They don't feel about it as Europeans do .") Lombard fulfilled the ninth referenced verse of the rhyme, shot to death on the beach by Vera, ("One got frizzled up ...") who believed him to be the murderer . Of all the "guests" he is the only one to theorize that "U.N. Owen" might be Wargrave, but the others reject this and it does him no good . He and Vera are the only guests not killed by Justice Wargrave . Technically he is the 8th person to die out of the ten guests . </Li> <Li> Vera Elizabeth Claythorne, a cool, efficient, resourceful young woman who is on leave from her position as a sports mistress at a third - rate girls' school . She has largely worked at secretarial jobs ever since her job as a governess was ended by the death of her charge, Cyril Hamilton . Claythorne let the boy drown so his uncle Hugo Hamilton could inherit the family estate and marry her, but Hugo rejected her when he suspected her crime . In the penultimate scene of the novel, she manages to take Lombard's gun, and shoot him dead in what she believed was self - defence . She returns to the house, relieved she has survived . When she goes to her room, she finds a readied noose, complete with chair beneath it, suspended from a hook hanging from the ceiling . She, in what Wargrave, hidden from her sight, describes first hand as a post-traumatic state, sees and hears Hugo, her former lover, encouraging her . She adjusts the noose round her neck and kicks the chair away, fulfilling the rhyme's final verse ("One little Soldier Boy left all alone; He went and hanged himself and then there were none .") </Li> <Li> Justice Lawrence John Wargrave, a retired judge, known as a "hanging judge" for liberally awarding the death penalty in murder cases . Wargrave is accused of influencing the jury to hand a guilty verdict to Edward Seton, a man many thought was innocent of his crime of killing an old woman, and sentencing him to death unfairly . However, as the two policemen discuss at Scotland Yard, new evidence after Seton's execution proved he was unmistakably guilty . He admits in his postscript that he has a lifelong hidden sadistic urge to cause death, but felt bound only to indulge it with guilty persons, and a lifelong wish to create a masterpiece of a mystery . Finding himself terminally ill, he creates a game in which, as island owner "U.N. Owen" (i.e., "Unknown"), he entices to an island various people who have been responsible for the deaths of other people, but escaped justice, through a third party agent, Isaac Morris, in order to be a murderer himself, and kill his "guests" in a way that would leave an almost - unsolvable mystery . After the deaths, he arranges the island so that each death appears to have a survivor . However out of what he admits is a "pitiful human need" for recognition, he also writes a confession, which he throws in the sea, and leaves to chance whether it will be found . His final act is to shoot himself in a way that matches the description of his death in some of the other guests' diaries, by using a rubber cord and handkerchief wrapped around the gun when he shoots himself in the head; the elastic will separate and attract no attention, and the gun and cloth will recoil a sufficient distance from him to avoid any suspicion of the true circumstances by the police . </Li> <Li> Isaac Morris is an unethical lawyer hired by Wargrave to purchase the island (under the name "U.N. Owen"), arrange the gramophone recording, and make various necessary arrangements on his behalf, including gathering information on the near destitute Philip Lombard, to whom he gave some money to get by (with the promise of more to come) and recommended Lombard bring his gun to the island (a fateful proposition, without which events could not have developed as they did to make Wargrave's gambit successful). Morris's is actually the first death chronologically, as he died before the guests arrived on the island . Morris was responsible for the addiction and suicide of a young woman through his narcotics activities . The victim by chance was the daughter of a friend of Wargrave . A hypochondriac, he trusted "Mr Owen" sufficiently to accept the latter's lethal cocktail of pills, assured they would improve his health, although Wargrave would have had to get rid of him in any event . </Li>

Who is un owen in and then there were none