July 22 Jim Vance Dies and John Heard is Dead

James Howard "Jim" Vance III (January 10, 1942 – July 22, 2017) was an American television news anchor in Washington, D.C. Vance lived in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was married briefly for 10 months when he was 19 and has a daughter Dawn from that marriage. A second marriage also ended in divorce in the mid-1980s. In 1987, he married his third wife, Kathy McCampbell Vance, a television producer and former WRC-TV executive. His other two children are daughter Amani (b. 1972), from his second wife, and son Brendon (b. 1976). He has two grandsons and one granddaughter. Vance battled a cocaine addiction in the late 1970s and early 1980s, later going public with the ordeal. Vance checked into the Betty Ford Clinic in 1984.

One night in 1987, Vance sat on the ground by the Potomac River at Great Falls, and he stuck his bird-hunting shotgun in his mouth and considered pulling the trigger. Vance stopped, lowered the shotgun, and cried. College friend Ed Bradley encouraged him to seek therapy, and Vance went for help at a dingy downtown support group "full of old-school drunks" the next day. In 2014, Vance spoke about his mother's verbal abuse of him as a child, and he advocated against that form of discipline. In May 2017, Vance revealed he was battling cancer, but he said he would continue working through treatment. He died July 22, 2017. At the time of his death, Vance was the region's longest-serving television news anchor with more than 45 years at WRC-TV.

John Matthew Heard Jr. (March 7, 1945 – July 22, 2017) was an American film and television actor. He had lead roles in several films, including Chilly Scenes of Winter, Heart Beat, Cutter's Way, Cat People, and C.H.U.D., as well as supporting roles in After Hours, Big, Beaches, Awakenings, Rambling Rose, The Pelican Brief, My Fellow Americans, Snake Eyes, and Animal Factory. He also played Peter McCallister in Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, as well as appearing in Sharknado. Heard was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1999 for guest starring on The Sopranos.

Heard married actress Margot Kidder in 1979. He has a son, John Matthew "Jack" Heard, with ex-girlfriend Melissa Leo. Heard was arrested in 1991 and charged with third-degree assault for allegedly slapping Leo. In 1997, he was found guilty of trespassing Leo's home in Baltimore, Maryland's Fell's Point neighborhood, but acquitted of charges of trespassing at their son's school. He has two other former wives, Sharon Heard and Lana Pritchard. Sharon and Heard have two children together, son Max and a daughter named Annika. Heard and Pritchard married on May 24, 2010, in Los Angeles and divorced on December 22, 2010 after about seven months of marriage. On July 22, 2017, it was reported that Heard was found dead in a hotel in Palo Alto, California where he was reportedly recovering after undergoing back surgery. The Santa Clara Medical Examiner's office confirmed his death.