Hostage Shows Instability, Ex-Wife Says

A 55-year-old American taken hostage Tuesday in Lebanon appears to be mentally unstable, his ex-wife said.

Ingeberg Tracy said in an interview from Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, with the Burlington Free Press that she and others in her village had received letters from Edward A. Tracy that led them to suspect he was mentally unstable.

In one, he claimed to “be the father of 5,000 motorcycles.” She said he sent another letter to one of her neighbors which said that one of their daughters had married an Arab sheik and that he had seen their younger daughter in a movie.

“The letters were so ridiculous, so crazy that . . . they didn’t make sense at all,” said his ex-wife, a West German national.

The Tracys, who were divorced in 1974, have three children, Lawrence, 24, Margaret Ann, 23, and Monica, 15, who live with their mother in Tenerife.

Tracy’s 78-year-old mother told reporters that “he chased money all over the globe. Sometimes he got it, sometimes he didn’t.”

She added that during a stay in Germany in the 1950s he “started a beer hall, but it flopped.”

Tracy, a well known character in West Beirut who was called “the Koran salesman,” told acquaintances he wrote children’s books. He also wrote poetry, some of it erotic, including volumes titled “Girls and War” and “Just the Way You Are.”