TILTON — The men who robbed Kay Jewelers in November used violence and terror to get what they wanted, but store cameras showed the victims responded with courage and selflessness.

With the alleged getaway driver in custody, police Chief Robert Cormier was sounding confident Friday that authorities would eventually capture the trio of masked and armed robbers.

“We’ve come a long way, but there’s still some work left to do,” he said. “I feel confident we’re going to bring all the suspects to justice eventually.”

Surveillance video captured the violence — and the courage — that erupted inside the Tanger Outlets store at 7:47 p.m. on Nov. 4.

Three men in black hooded sweatshirts, two of them wearing “Scream” masks, ordered the customers and employees to the ground at gunpoint. Then, as one robber kept watch on the clock, the other two used hammers to smash the glass display cases and scoop the jewelry into bags.

The robbery took just two minutes. The trio got away with more than $200,000 worth of jewelry.

Cormier said the disguises only added to the terror for the victims. “It’s scary enough being robbed at gunpoint and put on the floor. I think those masks just made it that much worse. ... They were pretty shaken up.”

Cormier said the head of security for Sterling Jewelers, the parent company of Kay, told him “this is the most violent robbery of any of their stores they’ve ever had nationwide.”

And that’s despite the fact no one was hurt. “Just the way it was carried out,” Cormier said. “They didn’t just want to take jewelry and run. It was the intimidation factor. Obviously, it was the intent to scare the customers, scare the employees.”

In the 10 weeks since the robbery, the police department’s two full-time detectives have focused entirely on solving it; the FBI has been assisting from the start.

The first break in the case came from what Cormier called “tips, information and leads.”

“We became privy to several people that either were involved or knew the people that were involved, and from that list of names we started to do interviews. And interview by interview, we eventually got to Katie Falls,” he said.

When police contacted Falls, 28, of Meredith, she came to the station and confessed to the crime, according to the chief. “She did admit to driving the suspects to the store and then driving them away from it.”

Falls was arrested Thursday on a felony charge of criminal liability for the conduct of another. She was arraigned Friday in Franklin District Court and is being held at Belknap County Jail on $50,000 cash bail, with a probable cause hearing set for Feb. 24.

Asked whether Falls is cooperating with police in naming her accomplices, Cormier replied, “I can say she’s being cooperative, and her arrest is definitely a huge part of the investigation, and it’s certainly going to help the case. I can’t say that she’s going to name individuals.”

Cormier said police decided not to wait to take Falls into custody. “If we arrested her last, certainly she could become the victim of witness intimidation,” he said. “They could certainly try to convince her not to cooperate.

“And so I think that by her coming forward and giving that admission, it at least takes that piece of the puzzle out for us. We suspected that there was most likely a getaway driver, and now we know there was one,” he said. “And I think that it helps us validate some of the other pieces of this investigation, to confirm that we were on track.”

With this kind of investigation, flight is always a risk, Cormier acknowledged. “You always worry that they can certainly run,” he said.

But, he said, “no matter where they go to, we certainly feel that we’re going to exhaust all efforts to bring them back.”

The U.S. Marshal’s Office and the FBI have offered assistance to bring the robbers to justice.

Cormier said authorities are still looking into the possibility that the robbers committed similar crimes in other states. And police haven’t ruled out the possibility that there may be others involved besides the three robbers and the driver.

There were only four customers in the store that night: a retired couple picking out jewelry together and a mother and her then-11-year-old daughter shopping for a birthstone ring for the girl.

Cormier said the four have all visited the store since the robbery. “I know that was a big thing for them to go back into the store, especially for the mother and daughter,” he said.

Cormier had noticed on the surveillance video that the mother pulls her daughter close and then removes her rings as the robbers smash the jewelry cases. He later asked why she did that.

“She said she didn’t want to draw any attention to her daughter,” he said.

Cormier was impressed.

“I’m thinking: Whoa, in the heat of all that stress and anxiety, in the middle of a robbery, she had the wherewithal to think, ‘If I hide my rings right now, they won’t come near my daughter.’”

He also noticed the store employee who, as soon as the men left, rushed forward to lock the doors. Then “she runs over to the mother and daughter, gets down on her knees to make sure they were all OK.”

Reached by phone Saturday, that employee said company policy forbids her to talk to the media. But she did say she previously served in the Florida Army National Guard, “so that did help.”

And she said there is a bond among those who were in the store that night. “There will always be,” she said.

Cormier said he’s seen it himself. “They all went through that traumatic incident together. You can just see it when you go in the store and they’re all in there together.”

The chief said residents of the community have been supportive, both of police and the robbery victims. “It’s on their minds every day.”

“I think we all want to bring closure to it,” he said.