Mary-Beth Gaskill, also known as Leslie Dupont, (born in 1878) was an American outlaw of the Wild West and a romance novelist during the early 20th century.
Biography[]
Mary-Beth Gaskill was orphaned at a young age when her mother died of typoid fever, but she ran away from the orphanage to become a pickpocket. Despite her criminal activities, she was known to be a good-natured and kind young woman who liked to read and write and dreamed of becoming a romance novelist. During the 1890s, she was caught while pickpocketing a man and fled from them, and she was rescued by Dutch van der Linde and became a member of his gang. She assisted in numerous robberies, and she fell in love with Kieran Duffy, a new member of the gang; she was devastated when he was killed and mutilated by the O'Driscoll Boys and sent back to camp on horseback with his severed head in his hands. In 1899, Gaskill left the gang as it fell apart, and she advised her terminally-ill friend Arthur Morgan to make his last moments count. After leaving the gang, she became a romance novelist under the pen name "Leslie Dupont", and she remained friends with Tilly Jackson and John Marston, frequently visiting Jackson and giving Marston her latest book, The Lady of the Manor, in 1907.