LAURENS — Flanked by her four children, former Carolina Investors vice president Anne Owen pleaded guilty Monday to fraud charges similar to the ones that put her husband in prison.

Owen, wife of the failed investment firm’s former president, Larry Owen, changed her plea to guilty after a pretrial hearing Friday. She is the third executive of the firm guilty of fraud charges in the state’s largest bankruptcy.

She remains free on $30,000 bond until sentencing in October. She faces up to 80 years in prison and $400,000 in fines for eight counts of misleading investors about the financial security of the Pickens investment firm in the year before it collapsed.

Larry Owen received an eight-year sentence for 22 counts of fraud.

Nearly 12,000 investors lost $278 million after the spring 2003 bankruptcies of Carolina Investors and its parent company, sub-prime mortgage lender HomeGold Financial of Columbia.

After a settlement with the officers, directors and outside consultants, investors who bought the high-risk, high-yield bonds will receive about 18 cents for every $1 lost.

During the brief plea hearing, shoe-horned into Judge James Johnson’s day of small-crime hearings and pretrial motions, Owen agreed to assist Attorney General Henry McMaster’s investigation into fraud associated with the companies’ collapse.

Her trial was scheduled to start the first week of August, but she changed her plea after the pretrial hearing, said her lawyer, Jim Bannister.

The change came after McMaster’s office indicated it would defer sentencing in exchange for her cooperation as the state pursues HomeGold officials.

Bannister also said his client wanted to come clean.

“Part of this is that she recognized she should have protected investors — should have asked HomeGold tough questions,” Bannister said. “She didn’t do that, and that was a problem.”

The hearing was sparsely attended, a change from the often-packed courtrooms that saw a guilty plea by Owen’s husband and a guilty verdict against Earle E. Morris, a former S.C. lieutenant governor and the company’s chairman.

After the hearing, McMaster said his office is still investigating the activities of officials connected to the financial collapse. He named no targets but referred to his office’s work as a “HomeGold” investigation.

“There is still a lot of work to be done to turn over every stone,” McMaster said.

He did not say what help he is expecting from Owen. Because it is a complex white-collar crime, he said, prosecutors need as many witnesses and documents as possible. Securities fraud cases revolve around documents and remembered conversations.

Bannister said Owen was not a high-ranking Carolina Investors employee, but she can fill in some blanks and connect some dots for prosecutors.

Bannister will share some documents, discovered during his preparations for her defense, that he said will help prosecutors build cases against others.

Reach Werner at (803) 771-8509 or bwerner@thestate.com.