BELLEFONTE -- A married York County woman who became enchanted with a "sweet-talking" convicted murderer was sentenced Friday for conspiring to help him escape prison and avoid authorities in several western states since 1986.

Diane Brodbeck, 46, of Wellsville will spend 27 months to five years in Muncy State Prison for helping inmate Jon Evans Yount leave an unsupervised work detail near the State Correctional Institution at Rockview nearly three years ago.

She was sentenced Friday before Centre County President Judge Charles Brown Jr. as 15 family members and friends watched, some in tears.

"I'd like to say a lot of things, but I don't think I'd better," her husband, Chester, said as he gathered his wife's belongings to turn over to authorities.

Mrs. Brodbeck has been living with her husband since last September, when family members posted $250,000 property bail.

"I regret having done it. But I cannot undo it," Mrs. Brodbeck told the court during a pre-sentence statement Friday. "I never thought it was possible to feel so much pain and go on living. I had no idea of the misery and grief I caused."

Yount, 50, a former teacher at DuBois Area High School in Clearfield County, was serving a life sentence for the April 1966 murder of Pamela Sue Rimer, 18, a student in his advanced math class.

He met Mrs. Brodbeck in 1983 through a prison ministry program and they became "very close" before the April 1986 escape, prison officials said.

After the escape, the couple lived for nearly two years under assumed names in several Idaho cities.

A team of federal agents last June 15 took Yount into custody while he worked in a garden outside his rented basement apartment near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Mrs. Brodbeck was arrested 45 minutes later as she returned from a job at a chimney sweep company in nearby Spokane, Wash.

Yount pleaded guilty to escape, was sentenced to 3 to 7 additional years, and resumed his life sentence at the maximum-security State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon. An appeal he filed awaits review by state Superior Court.

Terrence J. McGowan, one of two Harrisburg attorneys representing Mrs. Brodbeck, said he planned no appeals unless she expressed interest in filing one.

McGowan, calling Mrs. Brodbeck "someone who's led an inspirational life" and citing letters written on her behalf, advocated a seven-year probationary term.

Family problems at the time of the escape made Mrs. Brodbeck "somewhat less than her normal self," McGowan said.

"She met a man who was somewhat of a sweet talker," he said. "Except for falling for one guy after leading a law-abiding life for 43 years, she's ready to get back to that life and put her nightmare behind her."

Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar, who requested the maximum sentence of 3½ to 7 years, said probation for Mrs. Brodbeck would have issued the wrong message to the public.

"During the last three years, from the time she began to plan this until she was apprehended, she was a consummate hypocrite," Gricar said. "She decided to continue with this life and just wait until the knock came at the door. (Probation) would have been a green light for any do-gooders out in the community to take the law into their own hands."

Family members, some visibly upset, watched two friends testify on Mrs. Brodbeck's behalf.

"She told me those were the worst two years of her life," Wellsville resident Martha Skinner testified about Mrs. Brodbeck's time with Yount. "She was in way over her head . . . she was horrified when she had to sign a false name to get an alias."

Yount had served nearly 20 years when, on April 5, 1986, he disappeared from an unsupervised work detail at the State Correctional Institution at Rockview, a medium-security facility near State College. Mrs. Brodbeck drove him from the scene as part of an elaborate escape plan, authorities said.

Police later found her abandoned vehicle in Harrisburg, and brought charges against her for aiding in the escape.

Over the next two years, the pair traveled in Maryland, Nebraska and Wyoming before ending up in Idaho, said Mark Falvo, a clerk in the Clearfield County District Attorney's office who worked with the Pennsylvania State Police on the case.

Falvo was partially responsible for a dramatization of the escape on a May episode of NBC's "Unsolved Mysteries," which led to a phone tip police say was instrumental in the pair's capture.

Falvo, a Clearfield County native, said the Yount murder case remains a sensitive spot for many county residents.

"I don't think this is the last time Clearfield or Centre County has heard of Jon Yount," Falvo said Friday. "He was a teacher, (Pamela Sue Rimer) was a student. I think the people of Clearfield County still feel violated."