A WICKED granddaughter has been given a four-year jail sentence for pilfering her adoring grandmother’s entire life savings.

Former Keighley resident Katie Gosley-Shaw, 38, stole at least £140,000 from Ruth Gosley during a four-year period and left her to live on nothing but a measly pension.

The 89-year-old widow was left to freeze at her home with no money to pay for heating.

Her granddaughter had promised to order some heating oil during one of the coldest winters on record, but it never arrived.

Meanwhile, Gosley-Shaw was embarking on an eye-watering spending spree, using her grandma’s bank accounts to fund a luxury lifestyle. Between 2009 and 2013, Gosley-Shaw, now living at Prince Rupert Drive, in Tockwith, spent up to £175,000 of her gran’s money on designer clothes, hair-dos, cars, foreign holidays and hotel stays.

The mother-of-two, who was claiming benefits, also spent up to £200 a month on petrol, planned to buy a £540,000 house without a mortgage, splashed out £10,000 at a health spa and was renting a home with her gran’s money.

She also stole two precious gold necklaces from her grandmother, which had been given to the widow by her late husband, and wrote £33,000 of fraudulent cheques using her grandma’s bank accounts. The cheques bounced because Gosley-Shaw had already stripped her grandmother of all her cash.

Gosley-Shaw appeared for sentencing at Leeds Crown Court last Wednesday after being found guilty of five counts of theft and three of fraud following a trial in York.

Mrs Gosley had a total of £192,000 in cash and assets at the time her granddaughter embarked on her mammoth thieving spree. But by the time of Gosley-Shaw’s arrest in 2013, the pensioner was left with little more than £20.

Gosley-Shaw’s defence barrister, Nigel Jamieson, said the former hair products saleswoman had got into debt following the break-up of her marriage. He asked judge Rodney Jameson QC to suspend the inevitable prison sentence because Gosley-Shaw was a single mother of two children, one of whom had health problems.

But Mr Jameson said only an immediate jail term would be justified for the “mean and wicked” offences, adding the care of Gosley-Shaw’s children could be entrusted to her parents.

He told Gosley-Shaw: “You stole from your grandmother almost everything she had – it is about as mean an offence as it is possible to imagine. She was found by police in a freezing house in mid-winter. You knew precisely what your gran’s situation was. “Your grandmother indicated that she didn’t want to see you sent to prison. It can’t be easy for her – she said the prospect of not seeing you again was one she dreaded.”