Carabinieri profile calls ambulance driver Luca Spada a serial predator

A Carabinieri psychology report describes Luca Spada, the 28-year-old former ambulance driver accused of murdering six patients in the Forlì area by injecting air into their veins, as a serial predator whose choice of victims among the elderly and the sick was compatible with a predatory, serial pattern. The report says Spada acted on an "obsessive, uncontrollable internal motivation", according to the Italian news agency ANSA.

Spada has been held in prison since April 11 and has been ordered to immediate trial on one count, the murder of Deanna Mambelli, 85, who died on November 25, 2025 during an ambulance transfer. The first hearing is set for October 15 before the Corte d'Assise in Forlì. Inquiries into the five other deaths named in the files are still under way, according to metrotoday.it.

The prosecution says the victims were elderly and sick people encountered during medical transport work, and that they were not chosen at random. Spada has denied the accusations since his arrest in April, and no final ruling has established his responsibility, the news site metrotoday.it noted.

Report cited in refusal to grant house arrest

The Forlì prosecutor's office commissioned the study from the investigative psychology section of RACIS, the Carabinieri's forensic science unit in Rome, asking the specialists to examine the personality of the 28-year-old. Their findings are cited in the prosecutor's opinion and in the order with which the judge for preliminary investigations rejected, during the summer, a request to move Spada from prison to house arrest.

Defense lawyers had argued that there was no risk of a repetition of the alleged acts because the Red Cross dismissed Spada in May, cutting off his access to patients. Prosecutor Andrea Marchini took the opposite view, saying the RACIS report pointed to a danger that remained high. The characterizing element of the case, in the report's words, was criminal behavior with a serial character.

Spada, known as Spadino, comes from Meldola and drove ambulances for the Red Cross committee at Forlimpopoli and Bertinoro. He also took occasional jobs with a funeral home. Red Cross drivers in that role are not clinicians and were not permitted to administer drugs.

The deaths under investigation happened during ambulance transports of elderly patients. Prosecutors allege that Spada pushed air into a vein through a catheter, setting off a gas embolism that stops the heart, il Resto del Carlino reported. Mambelli's death, on November 25, 2025, was the most recent of the deaths under investigation. The investigation became public on March 2, 2026.

A pattern that repeats over time

Examination of the case papers showed conduct repeated over time with common and recurring elements, the RACIS specialists wrote. They identified an operational scheme that, in their reading, cannot be traced back to single isolated or merely occasional episodes, but amounts to a behavioral scheme repeated through similar and functionally coherent methods, drawing the deaths together into a single dynamic marked by a compulsion to repeat.

The specialists set out what they called the typical characteristics of people who commit offences of this kind: well-linked actions and articulated ideas, built on accurate choices of victims and on conscious decision-making. Investigators describe the reading they draw from that as predatory logic.

Spada's own hospital admissions were flagged as worthy of attention from a criminological point of view, the report said. In its reading they appear to belong to a preparatory phase, marked by persistent elaboration of the action, and are compatible with a form of experimentation, verification or refinement of the operational methods.

The cooling-off period, the interval in which a serial killer does not act, is read the same way. Rather than a suspension of the criminal project, the report treats it as the project continuing in less visible forms that remain equally functional for the commission of the crime.

Investigators doubt a financial motive

Spada collaborated with a funeral home in Meldola without a formal working relationship, a detail that emerged at the time of his arrest. Investigators examined it in search of a motive and then discarded it: none of the deaths listed in the files was handled by the company he dealt with, il Resto del Carlino reported.

The economic motive is in doubt precisely because the firm he worked with did not organize the funerals of the six people who died. Investigators, according to il Resto del Carlino, have described the case as a sort of angel-of-death killing rather than one driven by money.

The maintenance over time of the motivations and objectives of elimination without repentance or second thoughts is typical of those who commit offences of this kind.

Intercepted conversations are also in the file. In one, quoted in the custody order, Spada's partner asks him whether he has caused two deaths, in an exchange investigators describe as punctuated by laughter. In another, from November 2025, a colleague named Radu talks about the funeral market, saying that a lull in deaths in Forlì would push rival agencies out of business; Spada goes along with the market logic his companion sets out.

Spada has denied everything. He says he killed nobody and injected no substances, and that many of the intercepted conversations do not correspond to real actions. In a prison conversation in May he challenged the expert findings, arguing that the autopsy carries no weight and that no syringe was ever found.

Coffin selfies shared in group chats

Selfies with coffins in the background, photographs of hearses, exhumations, crematorium furnaces and joking captions were among the material Spada shared between the end of 2024 and the start of 2025 in group chats he belonged to, il Resto del Carlino reported. The content is now in the investigation file. Work colleagues told the Carabinieri in Forlì about it.

One image from September 2024 shows Spada in the foreground with four coffins behind him, captioned "I'll accompany you to Edmondo". In February 2025 he posted more coffins, joking that a consignment had arrived and he did not know where to put them. Another photograph showed a hearse outside a mortuary, with an invitation to call him for a ride. A later one showed an open coffin and the words "Today is exhumation day".

A female colleague, heard as a witness, described his habit of posting the macabre content of his second line of work, and the tone in which he did it.

Trial over a single death opens October 15

Spada, the former Red Cross ambulance driver held since April, faces an immediate trial that skips the preliminary hearing and takes the case straight to the Corte d'Assise in Forlì on October 15. It covers the death of Deanna Mambelli alone. The prosecution says her death was not natural but the result of a deliberate act by the former rescuer, metrotoday.it reported. The choice of an immediate trial sped the case toward the courtroom.

Investigators believe the autopsy on Mambelli is the decisive piece of evidence. The report on her body shows that she died of an embolism, il Resto del Carlino reported, which is what the prosecution says the injected air produced. Spada, who has consistently said he is innocent, disputes the finding.

A colleague was first to raise suspicions

The first person to voice suspicion was a young Red Cross colleague, who has not been named publicly. She gave investigators specific dates on which patients died during transport or immediately afterwards, and told them Spada was the only employee on duty across all of those shifts, always alongside a different second rescuer.

Questioning also turned to a syringe and a scalpel found in the pockets of Spada's uniform. The same colleague said she was taken aback, because it is not usual for a rescuer to carry either, and described the syringe as out of its plastic wrapping, with no needle and no cap. The Red Cross coordinator in Forlì told investigators there was no operational reason to carry them.

Statistical data strengthened the suspicion. At a news conference in April the chief prosecutor, Enrico Cieri, said six deaths had occurred across about 16,000 secondary transports and that Spada was on duty for five of them.

The predatory-logic reading has yet to be tested in court. If it is confirmed at trial it could become one of the elements through which the prosecution tries to reconstruct the alleged motive and the sequence of events, but the step from investigative reconstruction to criminal responsibility remains the decisive one, and it is the trial that will establish which elements can be used and what weight they carry.

Six deaths are under examination in the investigation, but only one has reached a judge. The number of deaths contested in the inquiry does not automatically match the number of facts already before a court, and accusations still being investigated are not the same thing as responsibility established in a judgment.

The October 15 hearing will be the first public test of the prosecution case, and for Mambelli's family the awaited moment for a judicial answer on how she died.