Walker Due to Get Life Sentence Today

John A. Walker Jr. is scheduled to be sentenced to life imprisonment today as allegations about the convicted spy remain unresolved--varying from uncorroborated information linking him to two unsolved slayings to disputes over his latest lie-detector tests.

Prosecutors and Walker’s defense attorney filed court memos in Baltimore on Wednesday giving conflicting assessments of his truthfulness in helping authorities to gauge damage done by the family spy ring he directed for 17 years until 1985.

The memoranda summarized each side’s arguments in the spy case, but they are not expected to affect the sentencing because the prosecution and defense have agreed to a life sentence in connection with Walker’s guilty plea to espionage charges last year.

Son to Get 25 Years

Under the agreement, Walker’s son Michael Lance, a former sailor, is to receive a 25-year sentence today for espionage, making him eligible for parole in a little over eight years.

The prosecution’s pre-sentencing memo noted suspicions by federal investigators, based on polygraph tests, that John Walker did not tell the whole truth in describing the material he sold to the Soviets while he was a communications specialist in the Navy. Prosecutors have decided not to withdraw from the plea bargain despite those suspicions.

There was no mention of the unsolved murder cases, of which Justice Department officials say there is no reliable information indicating John Walker’s involvement.

The source of the allegations linking Walker to the slayings, officials said, is Daniel Rivas, a former sailor who worked part-time for Walker’s Norfolk, Va., private detective firm and who had a falling out with him over the use of a bugging device in a domestic relations case.

Rivas’ Credibility Doubted

Justice Department officials said there is no evidence to support Rivas’ allegations and noted that the defense in the trial of another ring member, Jerry A. Whitworth, did not choose to call Rivas as a witness to impeach Walker’s credibility when Walker testified as a prosecution witness.

Rivas is “totally lacking in credibility,” one Justice Department source said.

One murder is the 1983 slaying of Carol Ann Molnar, a sailor who worked at the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. Her body drifted ashore a few hundred yards from where Walker docked his houseboat. She had been shot.

Rivas, according to a June 29, 1986, article in the New York Times Magazine, told agents of the Naval Investigative Service that he had been present at a hotel bar in northern Virginia when Molnar showed up for a meeting with Walker. The magazine said he told investigators that Walker owned a black ski mask like the one found in the back seat of Molnar’s car after her disappearance.

Woman Strangled

Rivas also reportedly told authorities of a conversation in which he said Walker told him he had killed Pamela Ann Kinbrue, a Navy radio technician who was found strangled in 1982. “There’s no solid evidence that Walker even knew Kinbrue,” a Justice Department official said.

Rivas was again questioned recently about the allegations at the insistence of naval investigators, but FBI and Justice Department sources said no supporting evidence resulted.

“They (Naval Investigative Service agents) immediately want to swallow it because they are so emotionally tied up in the damage he has done,” a Justice Department official said. “I have not heard of one FBI or Justice Department official who believes Walker is involved in the murders. No responsible person believes it.”

Rivas’ charges “are nothing more than unsubstantiated allegations,” said Fred Warren Bennett, Walker’s attorney.

Also convicted in the spy ring, besides John and Michael Walker, are friend Whitworth, who has been sentenced to 365 years, and John Walker’s older brother, Arthur J., a former Navy lieutenant commander, who was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Ronald J. Ostrow reported from Washington and Dan Morain from San Francisco.