Fred was born in San Antonio, Texas to Roger and Patricia "Trish" Burkle. When she finished college, she moved to Los Angeles for graduate school at UCLA. Originally majoring in history, Fred took a physics class with Professor Seidel, which inspired her to take another path. Around this time, she began working at Stewart Brunell Public Library. In 1996, while shelving a demon language book, a curious Fred recited the cryptic text out loud and was accidentally sucked into a dimensional portal to Pylea (her future friend Lorne was sucked into the same portal on his side and ended up in Los Angeles). It was later discovered that the portal was actually opened by Fred's jealous college professor, Professor Seidel, who had sent every promising student to it, essentially sending them to their death. Fred was the only one of at least six to return (cf. " Supersymmetry "). In high school or college, Fred was a marijuana user as shown in the episode " Spin the Bottle ". In that episode, she asks Wesley and "Liam" for weed and was also revealed to have had to take a personality disorder test and to be something of a conspiracy theorist.