Someone was buying BTC before this story broke.. then when it did they pushed a huge order through
to trigger a reaction from the BTC world.
the price of bitcoin increased/spiked roughly 2.5 hours after the story had broke....
there is a reasonable alternate conjecture - the private keys were fully entrusted to the other dude before he died, leaving Wright with no means of accessing the BTC1.1M.
I would find this unlikely. Especially considering the fact that as of when the other guy died the value of the 1.1M
BTC was enormous and would have likely asked for backups of the keys and/or for backups to be made that would be accessible in the event of his friend's death.
I think the spike is also that a post on the top of reddit.com was about how a dutch guy bought 25 dollars worth of bitcoin forgot and it is worth more than 1.2mil now (the link said 800k but it was old prices)