How a long-distance gaming romance ended in four violent deaths in a Pierce County home

About six years before Shane Vosler and Sue Bin Lee allegedly killed Vosler’s parents and spent months with the bodies in a Puyallup-area home, the two met playing video games online, and they began to fall in love.

It was a team-based shooting game called “Overwatch.” He often played the pink-and-blue, overconfident mech pilot known as D.Va. She was the bow-and-arrow-wielding assassin named Hanzo.

Thousands of miles were between them. Friends interviewed by The News Tribune said the two quickly became inseparable.

Vosler, a Pierce County native in his late 20s, was living on the second floor of his parents’ house in South Hill. He had attended a private Christian high school and then studied gaming development at a for-profit college in Tukwila that began to shutter while he was a student.

Lee lived in Massachusetts and worked as a freelance digital artist. She grew up in South Korea, went to high school there and later attended college at an art school in California.

In real life, friends said, they were lonely and socially awkward. Online they attracted small communities of people who adored them. Friends watched or joined them on livestreams of gaming or Lee’s work on illustrations. Together Vosler and Lee developed gaming projects such as a strategy board game called “Alien Hive Invasion.”

“They all loved him, you know, and Sue and him were kind of the king and queen of that group,” Paris Rizzi, a longtime friend of Vosler, told The News Tribune.

Rizzi, 29, lives in Florida. She’d been friends with Vosler for about a decade by the time he met Lee. She met him playing another game she said Vosler obsessively poured thousands of hours into, “Star Wars: The Old Republic.”

Years later she introduced him to “Overwatch,” and more recently it was Rizzi who contacted law enforcement in December to ask deputies to check on Vosler, whom she hadn’t heard from in weeks. She helped deputies get in touch with two relatives who made entry at Vosler’s home Dec. 31 in the 18900 block of Eastwood Avenue East.

Vosler, Lee and Vosler’s parents, William and Eileen Vosler, were found dead inside. Lee, 34, was found dead in an upstairs bedroom from a contact gunshot wound to the head, and Vosler, 33, was found dead behind a locked bathroom door upstairs. According to the Medical Examiner’s Office, he died the same way.

William, 68, and Eileen, 66, were found in states of decomposition in a freezer-fridge unit. The medical examiner later determined they were stabbed to death, with William additionally suffering from blunt head trauma. Investigators seized a handgun and a shotgun from the home along with notes on a leaking kitchen refrigerator that read, “Time of Death July 24th 5:45 AM” and “Time of death July 24th 3:00 PM.” The dates were two days after Eileen’s birthday.

The Sheriff’s Office later said investigators determined through evidence that Vosler and Lee had killed William and Eileen during the summer, lived in the house for about six months and then conspired to die by suicide closer to the end of December. Detectives were still trying to determine if Lee pulled the trigger herself or if it was Vosler.

A family member of Vosler who was reached by The News Tribune on Thursday declined to comment for this story at this time.

‘Cold, cold blood’

After Rizzi learned what transpired, she wrote to other friends of Vosler and Lee on a Discord channel that she was “in absolute shock.” Over the next week, she shared updates from the news, and others scoured the internet trying to find a way to contact Lee’s mother in South Korea without any luck.

In late January, some members of the Discord channel, which was started by Lee, speculated over what drove the two to carry out their crimes and about the level of Lee’s involvement. They looked back on final conversations. One user recalled Vosler telling them his parents were on vacation the last time they played a game together. Vosler’s YouTube channel showed he was still posting “Overwatch” gameplay in November, and Dec. 23 was the last day he logged hours on the gaming platform “Steam.”

Rizzi said she thought some people would try to blame what happened on Vosler’s and Lee’s mental health, but she said she knew her friend. She said she thought it was important that Vosler and Lee were held responsible.

“I know he in cold, cold blood murdered his parents,” Rizzi said.

“I cannot begin to explain to you the horrible horribleness of what they’ve done and sort of how badly they’ve just destroyed the rest of Shane’s family,” she added.

Another of Vosler’s longtime friends, Josh Capps, a Kentucky resident, told The News Tribune he knew Shane Vosler as a person with morals and values, and he couldn’t believe Vosler had done what he did. It wasn’t something that someone in their right mind does, Capps, 32, said. Even while they were continuing to live in the house, he said, Vosler and Lee could have sought help.

“It breaks my heart because now he’s not going to be remembered as the friend I knew him as,” Capps said. “He’s always going to be remembered as the person who did all that stuff. And that’s what hurts.”

Rizzi’s first impressions of Vosler were that he was strange and had “bizarre” ideas of how the world worked. She said he didn’t seem to understand money and had an outsized view of the wealth of his family and others.

“He thought everybody had like a chauffeur on speed dial,” Rizzi said.

Vosler didn’t talk much about his family life, Rizzi said. But she played video games with him every night, and she came to learn a few things about his life at home. Vosler’s parents, William and Eileen, were conservative, and Rizzi said his mother in particular was “very religious.”

When Vosler was attending college in the 2010s, he and his mother frequented a Starbucks near the South Hill Mall a few times a week. A barista there at the time, Paul Fix, told The News Tribune he got used to their routine. They’d usually visit in the afternoon. Eileen would get a mocha, and her son always got a frappuccino.

From the way Vosler carried himself and dressed — “like a guy in his 50s on vacation,” Fix said, — the barista thought the young man seemed sheltered and awkward. He picked up that his mother drove him to college in Tukwila rather than Vosler driving himself.

Vosler and Eileen were nice, Fix said, but the mother sometimes threw him off by bringing up Jesus in conversation.

“She’s like, ‘Do you believe that Jesus is your lord and savior?’ And I’m like, uh, yeah, no, totally.”

Vosler wasn’t especially religious himself, according to Rizzi. She said it was her impression that Vosler thought God was a joke. But she said Vosler had a deep respect for his parents and would do whatever they asked of him. Capps remembered playing video games with him late at night when Vosler suddenly said he needed to water the lawn.

“He goes, ‘Yeah, Dad wants me to sprinkle the lawn,’” Capps said. “Like, dude, it’s 3 a.m. And he said something like, ‘Yeah but if I do it now it’s not going to dry up and stuff.’ I was just like wait, what? OK.”

Before Vosler met Lee in 2018, Capps said, his friend didn’t seem particularly happy being alone and in his house all the time. Rizzi said the isolation was something Vosler chose, but it was also something his mother wanted.

After Vosler and Lee met, Vosler loved talking about her, Capps said. The three of them were a trio from time to time, talking with each other on Discord for five or six hours in one sitting.

“I think they were just two lonely souls that, you know, found something, and they just wanted to hold onto it,” Capps said. “I was just happy for him.”

When Lee moved in with Vosler near the end of 2021 or early 2022, according to Capps, the decision took him by surprise. Usually when he or Vosler made decisions, they talked about it. Vosler had convinced him to leave the Air Force years ago, validated Capps’ decision to live in Wyoming for a couple years and helped him pick out the car he drives.

Capps said Lee moving in was an “instantaneous” decision.

“I asked him, ‘Well, what’s your dad think about it?’ And he just would not talk about it,” Capps said.

A quiet life in east Pierce County

Court records and newspaper clippings show Vosler’s parents worked through financial and emotional hardships to build the quiet life they had in their gated South Hill neighborhood.

Before William and Eileen Vosler were married, Eileen had a previous husband she became estranged from in the late 1980s. According to an Associated Press story, the husband, Kenneth Gehring, stranded Eileen at her friend’s dairy farm in Graham one day in June 1989. The next day he returned apparently looking for her, and he shot three people to death before fatally shooting himself.

The next year, William Vosler retired from the Coast Guard, according to court records in Pierce County Superior Court. He’d joined up in 1974 after attending Rogers High School. After leaving service he got a job as terminal manager for American Transport in Seattle. He later got a degree in business management.

William Vosler was severely injured on the job, and it took years for him to get authorization for surgery he needed to address ruptured discs in his lower back. In the meantime, he later wrote in a sworn affidavit, he ran out of financial resources. He said he was married, had two teenage children and a baby on the way. He and Eileen filed for bankruptcy in February 1999 when they were living in Graham.

Eileen Vosler grew up in Pierce County, and involvement in local churches ran in her family. Her mother, Louise Jensen, relocated to Puyallup from Oregon as a child, according to Jensen’s obituary, and Jensen was known to play worship music at churches for years.

William Vosler said he obtained public assistance “out of desperation.” He then got a job, but he lost it in two weeks due to a labor strike, and he never informed public assistance that he had been working. In September 1999, he Eileen were charged with public-assistance fraud. They both eventually pleaded guilty and received suspended sentences.

He had a few different jobs in the early 2000s as a manager for different moving companies. In 2006, he and Eileen again filed for bankruptcy, but their petition was denied. By then they had moved to a residence in South Hill they rented for $1,200 a month, and Shane Vosler, 13, was their only dependent. The same year, William Vosler started a logistics, operations and transportation consulting business called Vosler Consulting.

William Vosler was the breadwinner in the home, according to documents filed in the bankruptcy case. Eileen made some money in 2005 doing labor for the moving company her husband worked for, but she reported having no monthly income from the past six months in February 2006. William Vosler went on to work in quality assurance, according to his LinkedIn account, and later in life he worked as a safety manager for a few different companies.

‘I knew something was very wrong’

Vosler’s father was a conservative. On Facebook in 2021, he reposted memes related to then-former President Donald Trump, videos from political commentators such as Ben Shapiro, quotes from Ronald Reagan and calls to “drain the swamp.”

Compared to her boyfriend’s conservative and religious parents, Lee was very liberal. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, she reposted videos and articles on Facebook from progressive media outlets NowThis and Salon concerning Trump’s anti-immigrant statements in his campaign and a journalist’s “invasive” questions about transgender people in an interview with actress Laverne Cox.

Her political views sometimes set her up for conflict with Shane Vosler’s conservative friends, like Capps, who recalled calling Lee out on some of her views as “kind of stupid.” Rizzi said she wasn’t sure how Vosler’s father put up with Lee’s opinions.

In 2023, Shane Vosler began to have health issues that led to some further friction in the household. Rizzi said Vosler started getting dizzy and out of breath if he stood or went up or down the stairs. In May that year, Vosler wrote on Discord that he had gotten a “load of tests” done at a local emergency room, but that the nurses and doctor on duty had no explanation for why his heart rate was shooting up.

Vosler’s own online research led him to believe he could have POTS, a condition that, according to the Cleveland Clinic, causes a fast heart rate, dizziness and fatigue when a person transitions from lying down to standing up. According to Discord messages reviewed by The News Tribune, Vosler had another appointment scheduled in October, and he said he hoped to get referred to a specialist. In the meantime, he said, he was studying for new I.T. certifications.

Rizzi said Vosler later got a wheelchair to help him get around. She had to drag that information out of him, she said, and she later found out that his parents didn’t believe his illness was real. She said Vosler tried to hide the wheelchair from his parents.

“The family very much had a mentality of, like, hide everything, don’t tell,” Rizzi said.

Now knowing that Vosler was later able to kill his parents, Rizzi said she questions the reality of Vosler’s condition, and she said she thought it was reasonable to say he was faking to an extent.

In early 2024, Rizzi began to suspect that something was wrong in the house. Vosler wasn’t online as much, she said, and when they did hang out, he was grumpy. After the homicides came to light, Rizzi began putting together a timeline in her head of the last six months. From others who interacted with Vosler or Lee, Rizzi gathered that Lee was picking fights with Vosler’s mother.

Rizzi said she thought at best, Lee wanted to stand up for Vosler when his parents would belittle him or tell him he was faking his illness, but that led to more problems.

“What it would do is it’d get his mom worked up, and then his dad would have to step in,” Rizzi said. “And Sue would go back up to their room while Shane dealt with the fallout.”

Capps also began to notice changes with Vosler. About halfway through last year, Vosler started taking a long time to return his messages, and, when he did, it was only one-sentence replies. Capps said he figured Vosler was just starting to move on in life. Later Vosler stopped responding at all.

In August, Rizzi said she messaged Lee to ask how their board-game development was coming along and how Vosler’s Minecraft world was going. Lee told her the board game was on pause, and Vosler hadn’t played Minecraft in a while. That sent off alarm bells.

“I knew something was very wrong then because he doesn’t just give up his passions and his obsessions,” Rizzi said. “And so I was frightened.”

The holidays came and went, and Vosler didn’t respond to Rizzi’s messages. After he didn’t reply to a “Merry Christmas,” Rizzi opened one of Lee’s online profiles Dec. 29 and found a link to a Wordpress blog with posts dated in November. Rizzi recognized it as a suicide note and contacted law enforcement.

“I honestly was just trying to get eyes on my friend,” Rizzi said. “I’ve made suicide calls for friends before. I don’t mess around with it. It’s mostly just like if I’m wrong then my friend is angry at me. And most law enforcement is happy to go knock on a door and have somebody not be dead.”