I still don't know what to think. I recall an earlier report that the television was a possible ignition source, but unless it was in Dining Room, that seems unlikely. Whatever it was caught Chief by surprise, and the smoke was so intense that he quickly got disoriented.
A firebomb would not have gone off directly inside the wall of the dining room. It would have been against the far wall or center, at the very least.
But this still doesn't seem like it should be that hard to solve. What could possibly have been an ignition source against that Dining Room wall?
It would if there were drapes drawn across the window. The fire bomb would more than likely fall down trapped between the drapes and the wall.
I don't know when the house was built; however, there was a time in the early 70's when the electrical code allowed copper and aluminum to be used together in residential housing construction (the was a "boom" period, and this was intended to alleviate material shortages). The problem is that these metals expand at different rates under electrical load with the result that at switches and outlets the connections loosen (where you connect the wire with a screw. At first this loosening just increases the resistance, and the outlet and several feet of wire heat up a lot. Then you get some arcing at the connection. Of course, everything is nice and hot so then a fire starts easily and spreads quickly.
We bought one of these houses over in the Glenshannon tract off 59. The "fair warning" that came with house was that we really ought to go around and check every switch and outlet at least once per year and make sure they were tight. Even with that, we had a couple of minor fires in the kitchen at a particularly heavily used outlet (on serval other occasions I noticed that outlet and adjacent wall were hot and was able to forestall any problems by tightening the connection). Eventually, the developer came back and re-wired some of the houses (lots of people were oblivious to the problem) but not all of them.
The fire discussed here is consistent with this kind of problem; however, I don't see anything in the report about electric except that two CB's were tripped off (i.e., no direct attribution to wiring).