Woman charged with theft remained the court-appointed guardian for dozens of vulnerable Nebraskans
By ANDREW WEGLEY/Flatwater Free Press
Flatwater Free Press
Becky Stamp had already been ordered to repay clients for inflated fees that she took from their accounts when a judge signed a warrant for her arrest in early November.
A court-appointed guardian who managed the lives and finances of dozens of vulnerable Nebraskans across 18 counties, Stamp allegedly racked up more than $21,000 in charges at shops across York using an account belonging to a man deemed incapable of making his own financial decisions, according to court documents. She was arrested and charged with three felonies, including abuse of a vulnerable adult.
Some judges — who appoint and oversee guardians in Nebraska — moved quickly to suspend or revoke Stamp’s powers. Others ordered reviews of Stamp’s financial filings.
But more than a month after her arrest, Stamp remained the guardian for at least 25 vulnerable Nebraskans, maintaining her authority over their living arrangements, medical care and, in most cases, finances, according to a Flatwater Free Press review of court filings in 42 cases in which Stamp had been appointed.
Advocates say the case is further evidence of “a systemic failure” to protect the 10,000-plus Nebraskans who, often due to old age, disabilities or injuries, are deemed by judges to be unable to care for themselves and placed in guardianships or conservatorships.
“I think that Nebraska is in desperate need of a safety net of more oversight for guardians,” said Amy Miller, a staff attorney at the nonprofit advocacy group Disability Rights Nebraska, which first publicized Stamp’s alleged theft in December.
The full extent of Stamp’s alleged thefts remains unclear. A state official told the Supreme Court Commission on Guardianships and Conservatorships in November that when she was arrested, Stamp served as the guardian and/or Social Security payee — a separate federal designation giving Stamp access to her clients’ government benefits — in approximately 77 cases, according to meeting minutes provided by the judicial branch.
In a search warrant filed in York County, a State Patrol investigator accused Stamp of moving money from the bank accounts of four more Nebraskans. A spokesman for the patrol said the agency is looking for additional victims.
In at least one case, Stamp’s alleged financial abuse did not end when she was charged, according to court filings.
In Merrick County, a judge waived required credit and criminal history checks in October to appoint Stamp as the guardian for a 46-year-old man diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Then, in December, Stamp wrote an $810 check to herself from the man’s account, an attorney alleged in a court filing.
The 46-year-old told his attorney that Stamp cashed the check and kept $400 for herself Dec. 5 — nearly a month after her arrest and at least three weeks after courts had been notified of the charges against her, according to the filing and other public records.
“I suppose the reality is that it would be foolish for anyone in the position of facing a criminal charge to continue to act in a wrongful way,” Miller said. “But technically, she does still have the power of guardianship until that has been revoked by a judge.”
Through her attorney, Stamp declined to comment.
Individual judges deferred to Corey Steel, the state court administrator. Steel said the judicial branch has “informal mechanisms” in place to immediately alert judges to potential issues “so the judge can determine what the next steps are.”
Steel declined to detail how the judiciary responded to Stamp’s case specifically, citing the state’s Code of Judicial Conduct. There is nothing in state law that requires a guardian’s removal in any case.
“A lot of it is judicial discretion on those individual cases, because each case and each example is vastly different,” Steel said. “And so it’s the judges that need to make the determination if they’re fit to be a guardian or not based on whatever allegations are being brought forward.”
‘I thought we had it tamed’
After a 2013 state audit revealed that a Bayard woman who had been assigned more than 600 guardianship cases had stolen thousands from her unknowing clients, Nebraska lawmakers overhauled the state’s guardianship system.
They established the Office of Public Guardian, meant to serve as a last resort for vulnerable Nebraskans who have no family able or willing to fill the role. The law’s passage made Nebraska the last state in the country to create a central office for guardianship.
The law barred public guardians within the office from taking on more than 20 cases at a time and required them to visit their clients once a month. But the law placed no such restrictions on private, for-profit guardians like Stamp.
“It’s very sad,” said State Auditor Mike Foley, whose 2013 probe prompted the policy change. “I really thought that we had made great progress 10, 12 years ago — whenever it was when we addressed this problem. Because it was the Wild West back then. I thought we had it tamed. But obviously we didn’t.”
State law already mandated guardians undergo background checks and required regular reports on the well-being and finances of the vulnerable adults in their care. But those reports sometimes went unfilled, Foley noted back in 2013.
In 2024, Disability Rights Nebraska raised similar concerns, warning in a report that county court staff lacked the resources to ensure guardians filed the required annual reports, much less review the documents for red flags.
The nonprofit furnished the report to the Supreme Court Commission on Guardianships and Conservatorships. Minutes from a November 2024 commission meeting said the report “highlights what this commission is working on to improve” and that the judicial branch is “really drilling down on some areas of the report that are internal system issues.”
Steel, the court administrator, said the commission proactively sought a change to state law the Legislature made last year authorizing the State Patrol to run national criminal history checks, rather than state-level checks, on those applying to serve as guardians in Nebraska.
“There is continued improvement that we need to do, and we take it serious,” he said.
State Sen. Wendy DeBoer of Bennington, who sponsored the 2025 law that nationalized criminal history checks, said she was looking into introducing legislation this year to limit caseloads for private guardians. But she cautioned that any attempts to fix the system’s shortcomings must weigh the risk of losing would-be guardians to overly burdensome paperwork requirements.
Ninety-five percent of guardians serving in Nebraska are unpaid and are often relatives or friends of the wards they are assigned to.
“I hope we do not have the kind of reaction we did the last time something really bad happened within this system, where then we have to sort of course correct over time,” she said.
Still, DeBoer acknowledged, the system “certainly didn’t work here.”
Stamp and her guardianship business — Stamped With Love LLC — now exist as Exhibit A for advocates and leaders arguing for further reform of the system.
Stamp was appointed the guardian in at least 14 new cases in 2025 — even as she was removed from others for failing to file financial reports or neglecting the Nebraskans she had been appointed to care for, according to court filings. She also faced lawsuits over unpaid debts.
Creditors sued Stamp and her husband three times in 2024. In April of that year, a debt collector filed suit in Lancaster County seeking $10,529 from the couple, who quickly repaid what they owed, according to court filings. Stamp’s alleged theft from the York man that led to her criminal charges began the same month.
In October 2024, a Red Willow County judge revoked Stamp’s guardianship in one case after the ward’s mother told the judge in a handwritten filing that Stamp had “almost zero communication” with her son in four months as his guardian.
In July 2025, judges in three counties terminated Stamp’s authority in a two-day span for failing to file annual financial reports or failing to appear at court hearings over the missing documents. Such reports are the only ones guardians in Nebraska are required to submit to state judges each year to account for their work.
But in most cases, Stamp held onto her post.
One judge left Stamp’s guardianship in place until mid-December despite an annual financial report being 20 months overdue.
Another kept her authority intact after the 22-year-old she was appointed to care for penned a letter asking the judge for a new guardian.
“My current guardian doesn’t check up on me or talk to me,” the woman wrote. “She also doesn’t help me with anything.”
A 22-year-old woman wrote to a judge asking for a new guardian. In her letter, she claimed that her current guardian, Becky Stamp, “doesn’t check up on me or talk to me.”
In another case, Stamp remained the guardian for a 55-year-old woman even after a judge ordered her to reimburse the woman $473 for fees and mileage she had overpaid to herself from the woman’s account.
The judge issued the order after auditing the annual form that required Stamp to detail a year’s worth of expenditures and explain why she should remain the woman’s guardian.
“So she gets the best care & nobody take advantage of her,” she wrote.
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This story was originally published by the Flatwater Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
