Might not be true for all TLDs, but I think you can actually pay to renew one's domain even if you don't own it.
In general it depends on the policy of the registrar (we are a registrar).
But even though renewing the domain gets by the defacto problem of payment there is still the contract between the registrant and the registrar. If the registrant dies then something happens to that contract. As a registrar for example we don't care who pays for the domain name and this happens quite frequently (designer pays etc.). But paying for the domain doesn't get you access to login and gain access to the account. In order to do that there would have to be some legal document (court document) which allows the new person to take control of the account. (And we've received this).
Now on a "wink wink nod nod" basis of course a registrar can do what they want to do whether legal, allowed or not.
But in the case of this domain, if we were the registrar, we wouldn't because the entire thing is to high visibility.
It would actually be quite easy for someone to (for whatever reason) blow the whistle on name.com doing something like this. ICANN may look into it and do something (they are auditing 1/3 of the registrars right now) or not.