Cindy Anthony: I searched for chloroform on computer

(CNN) - Casey Anthony's mother, Cindy Anthony, testified Thursday that she, not her daughter, conducted Internet searches for key words including chloroform and alcohol on the Anthony family computer in March 2008.

Cindy Anthony told jurors in her daughter's capital murder trial that she conducted the searches because she was trying to figure out what was making one of her Yorkie dogs "extremely tired all the time." Both the dogs ate bamboo plants in the backyard, she testified, so she started searching for chlorophyll to see if the plants were causing the dog's exhaustion.

A bacteria associated with chlorophyll production comes from different plants, she said, and some species of algae and seaweed produce natural chloroform, so the search led her from chlorophyll to chloroform.

She also was searching for other chemicals, including alcohol, she told defense attorney Jose Baez, because of a recent scare regarding hand sanitizers around small children. And she searched on some injuries, she said, because a friend of hers had recently been in a car accident and suffered head and chest injuries. She was, she said, "looking up specific terminology that someone had asked me to look up."

In a testy cross-examination, prosecutor Linda Drane Burdick noted that Cindy Anthony's work schedule showed she was working the days the searches were conducted, March 17 and 21, 2008. The witness said it was possible she could have been home, saying she went home early a couple of days that week.

"Were you or weren't you?" Burdick asked.

"The only thing that triggers that day for me is those computer entries," Cindy Anthony told the Orlando courtroom. "It was not a traumatic day for me like the last three years, so I can't tell you what time I went home."

Casey Anthony, 25, is charged with seven counts in the death of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, in 2008, including first-degree murder. If convicted, she could face the death penalty.

Prosecutors allege Casey Anthony used chloroform to render her daughter unconscious, then used duct tape to cover her nose and mouth, suffocating her. Caylee's remains, prosecutors allege, were then put into Casey Anthony's car trunk and eventually disposed of. The girl's skeletal remains were found in a wooded field on December 11, 2008, nearly six months after her family last reported having seen the child.

Defense attorneys say Caylee was not murdered, but that she accidentally drowned in the family pool on June 16, 2008, the day she was last reported to have been seen. They argue that Anthony and her father, George Anthony, panicked and covered up the death. George Anthony has rejected that scenario in his testimony.