I think the consensus was that in the final few hours before death, people’s odors change slightly, enough for a cat to notice. Remember that male cats can detect a female cat in heat from miles away.
Thus, the question should be why would the cat find this odor attractive?
Importantly, cats can only smell about 14 times as well as people, but some dogs have such an acute sense of smell, thousands of times better than a humans, and the facility to interpret those smells, that they surpass all but the most accurate odor sensory equipment.
Therefore, if there is a change in odor of a dying person, dogs should be intensely aware of the fact, even a considerable distance away. Thus, they could be trained to be far more accurate than this cat.
Correction. Dogs have the ability to detect many odors that even our most accurate equipment can't come close to detecting.