Alleged Thefts Before and After Arrest
When Stamp was arrested in early November, a state official told the Nebraska Supreme Court Commission on Guardianships and Conservatorships that she served as guardian and/or Social Security payee — a federal designation that granted her access to clients’ government benefits — in approximately 77 cases. A State Patrol search warrant filed in York County accused Stamp of moving money from the accounts of four additional Nebraskans, and a patrol spokesman said the agency is looking for more victims.
In at least one case, the alleged financial abuse did not stop after Stamp was charged. A Merrick County judge had waived required credit and criminal history checks in October 2024 to appoint Stamp as guardian for a 46-year-old man diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. In December 2025 — nearly a month after Stamp’s arrest — she allegedly wrote an $810 check to herself from the man’s account, according to an attorney’s court filing. The man told his attorney that Stamp cashed the check and kept $400 for herself on Dec. 5, at least three weeks after courts had been notified of the charges against her.
Amy Miller, a staff attorney at Disability Rights Nebraska, the nonprofit that first publicized Stamp’s alleged theft in December, said the situation illustrated the limits of the existing system.
“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 “But technically, she does still have the power of guardianship until that has been revoked by a judge.”
Cases Acquired Even as Others Were Stripped
Court records showed Stamp continued acquiring new cases even as warning signs mounted. She was appointed 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 adults in her care.
In multiple cases reviewed by the Flatwater Free Press, judges left her authority intact despite documented problems. One judge left Stamp’s guardianship in place until mid-December even though a required annual financial report was 20 months overdue. Another kept her authority intact after a 22-year-old woman she was appointed to care for wrote directly to the court requesting 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.”
In another case, Stamp remained 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 herself from the woman’s account. 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 hearings over the missing documents. Such annual reports are the only financial accounting Nebraska law requires private guardians to submit.
Corey Steel, the state court administrator, said the judicial branch has “informal mechanisms” in place to immediately alert judges to potential issues. He declined to detail how the judiciary responded specifically to Stamp’s case, citing the state’s Code of Judicial Conduct, and noted that state law contains no provision requiring a guardian’s automatic removal.
“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.”
A System Tested Before
The Stamp case echoes a scandal that prompted Nebraska’s last major guardianship overhaul. A 2013 state audit revealed that a Bayard woman assigned more than 600 guardianship cases had stolen thousands of dollars from clients who had no knowledge of the thefts. The findings led lawmakers to establish the Office of Public Guardian — making Nebraska the last state in the country to create such a central office. The resulting law capped public guardian caseloads at 20 and required monthly client visits, but placed no comparable restrictions on private, for-profit guardians like Stamp.
State Auditor Mike Foley, whose 2013 probe prompted those changes, said the current situation was disheartening.
“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,” Foley said.
In 2024, Disability Rights Nebraska warned the Supreme Court Commission in a report that county court staff lacked the resources to ensure guardians filed required annual reports, let alone review them for red flags. Minutes from a November 2024 commission meeting said the judicial branch was “really drilling down on some areas of the report that are internal system issues.”
“I think that Nebraska is in desperate need of a safety net of more oversight for guardians,” Miller said.
Calls for New Legislation
State Sen. Wendy DeBoer of Bennington, who sponsored a 2025 law requiring national rather than state-level criminal history checks for guardian applicants, said she was looking into legislation to limit caseloads for private guardians. She cautioned that new requirements must be weighed against the risk of discouraging volunteer guardians; 95 percent of guardians serving in Nebraska are unpaid and are often relatives or friends of the people they care for.
“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,” DeBoer said.
DeBoer acknowledged the system “certainly didn’t work here.”
Through her attorney, Stamp declined to comment.
Reporting by Andrew Wegley of the Flatwater Free Press, distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.