Hysteria in Apartment 213: Perfect Pop, the Cursed Apartment, and the Milwaukee Cannibal

Hysteria, Def Leppard’s fourth album, was born in August 1987 like a radiant virus—surgically engineered by Robert “Mutt” Lange to infect the airwaves. Seven singles slipped into the charts like a perfect swarm of sticky melodies. It was irresistible. A pop weapon calibrated for total FM domination.

But beneath that bright record, there was a dark footnote.

A copy of Hysteria was found by police in Apartment 213 of the Oxford building in Milwaukee. The infamous residence of Jeffrey Dahmer. Later, it was handed to his father—along with a collection of horrors in black garbage bags.

Contrary to urban legend, Dahmer didn’t listen to Slayer or Metallica. He wasn’t a “metalhead” at all. His mental soundtrack was far more insidious: The Beatles—especially “I Am the Walrus”—and Black Sabbath. That’s what echoed through his head as his inner world collapsed between spiritist sessions to speak with the dead and cheap liquor to sedate his sick obsessions. Dahmer was left completely alone in his Bath, Ohio home after both parents abandoned him at age 18. Death was already whispering in his ear.

That same year, 1978, while police were arresting John Wayne Gacy—the "killer clown"—Dahmer was quietly dismembering his first victim: Steven Hicks, a hitchhiker. He killed him with a barbell. That barbell—the quintessential symbol of American fitness culture—would ironically become the very weapon that sealed his fate: in 1994, another inmate would beat Dahmer to death with the same kind of bar. A full-circle blow.

Coincidence. Luck. Fate. Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say part of it is luck—part of it are the choices we make.

Dahmer’s second victim also shared the same first name: Steven Tuomi. It was in 1987—the year Hysteria conquered radio. While Def Leppard packed stadiums, Dahmer began filling his fridge with human remains and his nightstand drawer with Polaroids documenting his abominable acts.

By the 1990s, his soundtrack had shifted. He was listening to Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard. He frequented seedy underground clubs, where experimental dance music pulsed through anonymous bodies. One night, he accompanied someone to a Skinny Puppy show. The day of his arrest, July 22, neighbors reported that Clock DVA was blasting from his apartment. The irony of the algorithm: one might expect his playlist to be Throbbing Gristle. But no—Dahmer was never truly into music. He used it as background noise to drown out the screams of the void.

Still, it’s not hard to picture him with headphones on, in that time-frozen, foul-smelling apartment, listening to “Animal” or “Love Bites” while scrubbing bones clean or assembling his altar of meat and silence.

It would’ve been grotesquely fitting if his favorite band had been Fine Young Cannibals. But it wasn’t. Ironically, that was one of Steve Jobs’ favorite bands. “She Drives Me Crazy.” Welcome to the club.

> “I was born too late… maybe I should have been Aztec.”

—Jeffrey Dahmer

He was also an unintentional pioneer of what would later become viral: photobombing. Dahmer would sneak, uninvited, into school club photos in high school. His expression? Always odd, always unsettling. They say he had a peculiar sense of humor. While being led through courthouse hallways in handcuffs, he’d notice the horrified faces and say, “Sorry… I didn’t shave today.”

Another catchphrase? “Careful... I bite.”

On May 10, 1994, Dahmer was baptized in prison. That same day, John Wayne Gacy was executed. His final words? “Kiss my ass.”

And as if the universe had a flair for theatrics, that day saw a total solar eclipse. Carl Jung wouldn’t have called it coincidence—he’d call it synchronicity.

That same symbolic pattern linked Dahmer to another serial killer across the Atlantic: Dennis Nielsen. Both practiced necrophilia. Both were alcoholics. Both tried to preserve the bodies of their victims—as if trying to stop time itself. Neighbors tipped off police: Dahmer’s building reeked; Nielsen’s plumbing was clogged with human remains. Dahmer listened to Def Leppard. Nielsen? The rock opera Tommy by The Who. One froze. The other boiled.

Jung believed synchronicity wasn’t chance—it was emotional resonance. As if the collective unconscious had its own soundtrack.

And yet, despite it all, Dahmer’s family—father, mother, stepmother—never let him go. They admitted abandonment had been a ticking time bomb. Dahmer didn’t want to kill for pleasure. He wanted to preserve. To desperately hold on to what he couldn’t bear to lose. What he no longer had. In his mind, the only way to keep someone… was to take their life.

As a teen, he was friends with Derf Backderf, who later wrote the graphic novel My Friend Dahmer—a haunting portrait of a monster in the making. Detective Patrick Kennedy interrogated Dahmer and extracted chilling details for his book Grilling Dahmer. Kennedy was among the few who saw the human being inside the cannibal.

Another was Roy Ratcliff, the pastor who baptized him in prison. Despite harsh criticism—“If Dahmer’s going to heaven, I don’t want to be there”—Ratcliff never abandoned him. Dahmer sent him a handwritten thank-you letter just weeks before his death. Ratcliff still considers it one of his most treasured possessions.