A woman accused of financially exploiting and stealing from her grandmother shopped for shoes and jewellery after paying $7,000 of the elderly woman’s money into her own account, a court heard yesterday.Audra-Ann Bean, 44, of Lusher Lane East, Warwick, took the witness stand in her own defence at the trial of her and her co-accused sister Lorraine Smith, 46, where she denied any wrongdoing.She was asked by Crown counsel Garrett Byrne, under cross-examination, to confirm she withdrew $7,000 by cheque from an account she shared with Ms Smith and their grandmother Lenice Tucker, 87, and paid it into an account of her own on September 10, 2010.Ms Bean said she did, adding she had permission to withdraw the funds from her grandmother, whom she had asked to help her pay some unspecified bills.The defendant confirmed she paid $5,000 off her credit card on September 16, giving her available credit of $5,252.Mr Byrne said “I just want to see what you spent the money on” before listing transactions at Marks & Spencer, WJ Boyle shoe store, Gorham’s, Lindo’s, Gibbons, Nine West shoe store, Audio Visual Electrical, Impressions Hair and Nails, AS Cooper and ER Aubrey jewellery store.The prosecutor asked what Ms Bean bought at the latter shop and she replied: “A gift. Earrings.”Mr Byrne said: “Who was it for?” After a pause, Ms Bean agreed she did not remember.Mr Byrne asked if she told her grandmother “that the bills you wanted help with were these, that you wanted to buy some shoes and some jewellery?”Ms Bean said: “No, I did not. I hadn’t purchased these as yet.”Mr Byrne said: “Was it because you never had those conversations at all? You are telling us a pack of lies.”He put it to her that she and her sister pressurised their grandmother into adding them to her bank accounts just days after Ms Tucker’s 91-year-old sister Lesseline died on July 15, 2010.Lesseline left $540,000 in five bank accounts to which Ms Tucker, of Middle Road, Southampton, was a cosignatory.The two sisters opened joint accounts with their grandmother at HSBC and Butterfield banks on July 20 and 21, 2010.Mr Byrne alleged: “You never gave her any opportunity to think about what she was doing or to understand what she was doing.” Ms Bean said that wasn’t true.The prosecutor suggested to Ms Bean that on October 8, 2010, when the sisters transferred $456,885 from their accounts with Ms Tucker into bank accounts in their names only, they did so “dishonestly” and “to use all of that money for yourself”. Ms Bean denied that was the case.Earlier, during her examination-in-chief by defence lawyer Larry Mussenden, she insisted she did not abuse her grandmother and did not jointly with Ms Bean steal $456,885 from Ms Tucker or separately steal $7,000.Ms Bean said the accusations were “not true”, adding: “Members of the jury, I would like you to find me not guilty in this matter.”Both defendants say they transferred their grandmother’s money to their own accounts on the advice of a lawyer to protect the money from their drug-using father Ivan Bean and another man.Ms Bean broke down in tears when describing her father’s drug use. She told the court she and her son Antoine lived with Mr Bean for years at Overplus Lane, Sandys.She said of her father: “He did use drugs and I used to try and help him through that and try to help him get help.”Asked to give details of the drug use, she said: “Sometimes when he did use it, you could smell it. It was a strong, potent odour.“When I saw him, his eyes were bloodshot, red, wide, bulging out of his head, and his speech was often slurred.”Mr Mussenden asked if he used anything in the house to take drugs.The defendant said: “My spoons used to go missing a lot. I went in his room and I could see the spoons. They were burnt.”At that point in her evidence, Ministry of Education paraprofessional Ms Bean began sobbing and had to sit for several minutes while she gathered herself.Prior to giving her evidence, the Seventh-day Adventist Church-going defendant affirmed her oath, rather than swore it on the Bible.Mr Mussenden asked why and she replied: “It’s against my religious beliefs so I prefer to affirm and not swear.”Puisne Judge Carlisle Greaves later instructed the jury: “There can be no adverse inference drawn against any witness because a witness chooses to do one or the other.”The defence closed its case yesterday and both sides are expected to begin summing up today.