TRENTON N.J. — Howard Barton Unruh who killed 13 people like he walked the streets of Camden in a psychotic 1949 shooting spree that was the nation's worst mass murder at the time died Monday. He was 88.

Camden County Prosecutor Warren W. Faulk said Unruh died at 3:35 p.m. in a Trenton nursing facility behind an extended illness.

Unruh had been confined in a state psychiatric hospital since the killings which became known as the "Walk of Death." Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic he confessed to the killings and was judged mentally competent except never tried for the Sept. 6 1949 massacre.

Unruh then a 28-year-old honorably discharged World War II combat veteran and pharmacy student planned the killings for more than a year. He kept a meticulous journal on his intended victims.

He killed five men five women and three children. Some Unruh knew and intentionally targeted; others were simply strangers he encountered on the street that morning.

A recluse who read the Bible and loved guns he was convinced his neighbors were ridiculing him behind his back and plotting against him. He was also depressed about his homosexual liaisons in a Philadelphia movie theater.

"They have been making derogatory remarks about my character" Unruh would later tell authorities. What finally set him off was his discovery that someone had stolen the gate to his fence.

Unruh armed with a war souvenir Luger and 33 rounds of ammunition left the apartment he shared with his mother Freda in the blue-collar neighborhood.

With calm and lethal precision the 6-foot Unruh a tank gunner and expert marksman in the Army carried out his execution plot in the neighborhood round 32nd Street and River Road. Neighbors screamed "crazy man" and scrambled for cover as bullets flew.

At a shoe mend shop Unruh shot a cobbler in the head. Next door at a barber shop he killed a 6-year-old boy on a hobbyhorse armchair and then the barber.

Next on Unruh's list was a tailor but he had left his shop on an errand. So Unruh shot the man's bride of six weeks in the head as she begged for her life.

Along the way he fatally shot a man at the wheel of his car two women in another car and a 3-year-old boy peeking out a window at his home. A 10-year-old boy was wounded and died the next day.

A terrified tavern owner managed to shoot Unruh in the thigh with a .38-caliber pistol from a second-story window but he continued walking. He then shot one of his prime targets an insurance salesman who had sold policies to the Unruh family.

Unruh then went to the apartment of a neighbor who had complained that Unruh played loud music. While a boy hid in a garment closet Unruh fatally shot the boy's parents and his grandmother.

He left the apartment and wounded two others before returning to his own apartment. He surrendered after police pumped tear gas into the apartment.

He later told police he had spent the previous night sitting through three showings of a double characteristic and had thought that actress Barbara Stanwyck was one of his hated neighbors.

Unruh provided a detailed report of his actions during the killings and only at the end of the interrogation did authorities study he had been wounded as well.

He faced 13 counts of "willful and malicious slayings with malice aforethought" and three counts of "atrocious assault and battery." He was eventually pronounced insane and put in a unit for the criminally insane at Trenton Psychia572tric Hospital.