Provide an outline of the life and Crimes of Fred West and throughout your account discuss how closely his history parallels the FBI Offender Profiles of serial killers.

Authors Avatar

Provide an Outline of the Life and Crimes of Fred West and throughout your account discuss how closely his History parallels the FBI Offender Profiles of Serial Killers.

In February 1994, Fred West was charged with the murder of his daughter Heather West; however, what followed in the months of March and April newspapers began to report the amazing discovery of one of the most prolific serial killers of the 20th century. Police officers, whose aim was to retrieve the remains of Heather West, discovered that Heather West was not the only murder victim buried within the home of Fred and Rosemary West.  25, Cromwell Street, now dubbed the ‘House of Horrors’ by the national press, was the site of a further nine murder victims and a further three victims were situated in fields and buildings nearby. The questions to ask surrounding these horrific crimes, is what drove Fred to these murders; and using the FBI Offender Profile, an attempt will be made to discover the motivation of Fred West to drive him to this.

Criminal behaviour has been studied for many years, and for many years the police have been using criminal profiling to determine the type of perpetrator they were seeking, as well as the possible motivations for the crimes that they are committing. As stated previously, the most commonly known type of criminal profiling is used by the Behavioural Science Unit (BSU) within the FBI. After many years of research, they were able to determine that offenders can be organised or disorganised.

According to the FBI profile, the organised offender can be described as a man, roughly aged between 18 and 45, either married or living with a partner, of high intelligence which is masked by poor behaviour in school, middle class and well built. The FBI describes that the offender usually lives some distance from the crime scene; however, in the case of Fred West this was not true. The employment that the offender carried out was usually masculine in nature, such as a builder, and is sporadic. Most importantly, the FBI describes the previous convictions that the offender could have been charged with and these include sexual offences, petty crime and interpersonal violence. When comparing the profile of an organised offender to Fred West, the similarities are uncanny due to the fact that the life of Fred West almost mirrors the offender profile.

Frederick Walter Stephen West was born on the 29th of September 1941 to Walter and Daisy West. Walter West was born in 1914 and as a child was intimidated by his father. Walter received very little education due to leaving school at the age of eleven, and therefore had major difficulties in reading and writing, thus having the occupation of a farm hand. His wife Daisy Hill was born in 1923. She married Walter in 1940 at the age of seventeen and shortly afterwards, she fell pregnant with Violet West, who died shortly after birth. However, in 1941 Fred West was the first surviving sibling of the West family. Fred was the eldest of six surviving children and this fact alongside the offender profile of the FBI restates that Fred West was an organised offender.

Join now!

The relationship with his mother was very close, and Howard Sounes states in his book, that Daisy showed “more than motherly love” for her son. It was rumoured that Daisy took Fred back into her bed when he was at the age of 12 and seduced him. However, Howard Sounes also points out that Walter may have been a dominant influence on Fred’s sexual awareness. Fred claimed that Walter had “indulged” in having intercourse with young girls, thus Fred growing up with the belief that this act was natural and that it was a right of a man to ...

This is a preview of the whole essay