No. Edgar Degas was never a suspect in the Whitechapel murders, and no serious account of the case names him. The painter who gets accused is Walter Sickert, a British artist who learned from Degas. The case against Sickert does not survive a close look either.
Sickert met Degas in 1883, while delivering a painting by James McNeill Whistler to the Paris Salon. In the summer of 1885 he painted at Dieppe with both men. Degas became his mentor, and that friendship is the only thread that ties Degas to the Ripper.
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In 1907 Sickert painted a rented room. The canvas now hangs in Manchester Art Gallery, and the title that stuck to it is "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom."
Almost every accusation against Sickert leads back to that painting. The story behind it begins with a landlady, and it is not even the shakiest part of the case.
The painting came to Manchester as a bequest in 1980, and the novelist Patricia Cornwell later used it as evidence in her 2002 book on the case. A title can do that. It takes an ordinary room and hands it a murderer.
What You'll Discover
What a landlady told Sickert.
Where the accusation really started.
What a novelist did to a painting.
Where Sickert spent that autumn.
What Degas taught his pupil.