Three months after Caroll Patton testified under oath that she didn't know of her brother George's intentions during his summer robbery spree, the 36-year-old admitted she had been in on the heists all along.

As her manacled brother looked on, Caroll Patton tearfully told Centre County Judge David E. Grine she knew her brother planned to rob the various stores she drove him to in the Centre Region, and said she even received a cut of the proceeds in drugs.

"He told me to keep my mouth shut and do my time because I needed to clear my head," she said, her head bowed. "I was afraid."

Caroll Patton's admissions, flatly contradicting earlier claims that she was drug-free and ignorant of her brother's activities, painted a grim picture of the pair's desperation for drugs that she said drove them to steal.

Throughout her testimony, Caroll Patton studiously avoided her brother's eyes -- except for one broken occasion in the testimony, when she addressed him directly.

"I'm sorry, George -- I love you," she sobbed. "But what we did was wrong. No matter how much I want to change it, it was wrong."

George Patton stands charged with nine counts of robbery in relation to multiple heists strung out across central Pennsylvania and the summer months. Caroll Patton said she and her brother would "immediately" buy drugs -- cocaine in her case -- after each robbery.

She said George Patton kept a bag ready in her car that contained everything he needed -- a black T-shirt, black pants, a bandana and a fake gun. They never talked about the robberies beforehand, but, as she put it, "I'm not stupid."

"I knew what he was doing," she said. "You don't drive that far for ... for a soda."

Caroll Patton said she had a feeling her brother's last robbery -- a Snappy's convenience store in Ferguson Township -- would go wrong. She said she refused to pull into the store's parking lot, waiting at a nearby Comfort Inn instead. When she saw George Patton running toward her and heard squealing tires, she said she knew something had gone wrong.

"The cops are coming," she recalled him saying.

Turning onto Atherton Street, she saw that police were close behind her. She said they turned on the flashers and she began to pull over.

"Damn it, Caroll," her brother said, according to her account. "You gotta keep moving."

Against her better judgment, she said, she did.

"We hit a dead end and George ran," she said, "and I ended up in jail."

Despite their apparent coordination, Caroll said she never went over the details of the robberies with her brother beforehand.

"It's not like we planned anything," she said.

Therein lies public defender Deborah Lux's defense. Since Caroll Patton and her brother never officially made plans regarding the robberies, she said, George Patton can't technically be charged with criminal conspiracy.

"That is the essence of a conspiracy charge -- that they had an agreement," she said.

And since Caroll Patton has now openly admitted she lied under oath, Lux said she plans to make sure this fact is made perfectly clear to her brother's jury.

Both Lux and prosecutor Karen Kuebler agreed to write up their arguments in briefs instead of presenting them before Grine yesterday. Lux is pushing to clear her client of several criminal conspiracy charges and spin off several of his robbery charges into other trials.